What Do Our Genes Reveal About Our Past? w/ Richard Dawkins

What Do Our Genes Reveal About Our Past?with Richard Dawkins Transcript Brian Keating:Why does this peculiar desert lizard have such intricate patterns on its bang? And what does it tell you about its long dead relatives? Today, we have the extraordinary privilege of exploring these topics and more with one of our greatest living treasures, Richard Dawkins, one of the world’s most influential and thought provoking scientists. Richard Dawkins:Genes are predicting the future because they will not survive unless they get the prediction right. Brian Keating:Richard is a renowned evolutionary biologist, zoologist, and author, a prominent figure in the new atheism along the other so called horsemen of the apocalypse. Past guest Sam Harris and the late great Daniel Dennett. He’s well known criticism of creationism and intelligent design. Richard Dawkins:You can’t opt out of science be because it goes against a traditional faith. Brian Keating:In our wildly ranging conversation, we explored the evolution of sex drive and the aesthetic appreciation of genetics, as well as the way genetics intersect in theoretical and experimental science. We talk about the potential evolutionary outcomes of artificial intelligence as it augments humanity. We talk about what it’s like to be a scientist in a scholar with a career ranging over 50 years. Then we encounter along our journey some of the greatest figures in all of science. I know you’re gonna love this episode, so let’s go. Brian Keating:So would you do us a favor of doing what you’re never supposed to do, which is to judge the book by its covers? Tell us the name, choice, the subtitle, and cover of art. Richard Dawkins:Well, here can can you see the book there? Or Yeah. Is that visible? Yes. Okay. Yeah. It will be. So that’s the front cover, and that that’s the back cover. It’s called the genetic book of the dead. It’s a kind of play on the Egyptian books of the dead which were, books that were buried with important people in ancient Egypt and as a sort of guide book to guide them into the into the afterlife. Richard Dawkins:The connection is pretty tenuous, but I suppose you could say that the genes Clarke, guiding the animal into, how to propagate the genes into not exactly the afterlife, but into the next the next generation. The subtitle is a Darwinian reverie, and it means it’s a kind of meditation on evolution. It’s it’s not a particular one theme. It’s a it’s a meditation by the author of The Selfish Gene 40 or so years later. And not, climbing down from The Selfish Gene, but expanding in various directions. The the art on the back cover is, cobbled together from the art in the book which is, drawn by Jana Lentsover, in color, computer art in color. The theme of the book, insofar as there is a single theme, is this. The animal, any animal, and its genome can be regarded as a description of a written description, a book about the ancestral worlds in which the animal’s ancestors survived. Richard Dawkins:The animal is a product of Darwinian natural selection of its ancestor’s genes. Those genes that were successful in the past in getting themselves passed on are the ones that survive to the present, obviously. And therefore, they can be regarded as a kind of description of those selection pressures, those worlds in which the ancestors survived and reproduced, were successful in reproduction, successful in attracting mates, successful in rearing offspring. The book begins the the first illustration in the book is a is a picture of a Mojave Desert lizard which has its desert environment painted on its back, so to speak. It looks as though somebody’s come along and literally painted the desert stones and sand on the back of the lizard. And you can see the same kind of thing in any camouflage animal, camouflaged Arthur camouflage, snail a camouflaged frog, etcetera. Natural selection has favored those ancestral animals that resembled their background, and in some cases, the resemblance is uncannily exact. It’s really remarkable. Richard Dawkins:It really does look as though somebody’s come along and painted the background, painted the desert in this case on the animal’s back. The thesis of the book is that this painting is not limited to the superficial skin of the animal but goes right through the animal. Every single detail of the interior of the animal must be a description of desert in the same kind of way, but more indirectly as the picture on its skin. So the chemistry of the blood, for example, if you were sufficiently educated in biology, which we’re not at present, then theorists of the future can would be able to read the biochemistry of the blood as being having a desert written all over it. And same applies to any animal. Any animal will have its environment, the environment of its ancestors written into every detail of the interior as well as the exterior of the animal. Brian Keating:It’s quite a beautiful book. It’s beautifully written and, I assume it will be beautifully bound. It looks like it it is behind you. I I did some primary source research. So I I looked up the Egyptian book of the dead, and how it begins, began. And it seems to begin with an homage to, to Ra, Akhenaten Ra, the the art whose disc, thou great god, art in my boat. Thou hast risen on the horizon. Thou hast filled the lands with radiance. Brian Keating:Thou art beautiful. Thou art young. Thou art mighty. Thou art born forever and ever. Are genes sort of like this all animating force or do they do they only live? Do they die? Are Arthur they like this this all powerful disk that illuminated the worlds of the Egyptians? Richard Dawkins:Well, that’s very interesting. They sort of are. I mean, that going on forever and ever is exactly what they do in the form of copies.

Will We Ever Find a Theory of Everything? Brian Keating & Curt Jaimungal

Will We Ever Find a Theory of Everything?with Curt Jaimungal Transcript Brian Keating:Experimentalists are kinda like exterminators. Our job is to kill off the bugs, skin theories, and destroy theories that don’t comport with evidence. We’re not required to create new theory, and also look, what are the limitations of experiments? So most of our time is looking for ways to prove ourselves wrong, which is Feynman said is the job to not be, to not be fooled. Curt Jaimungal:First of all, let’s get get through the questions 1 by 1. What are your goals? Explain to the audience what you do with your channel, what your goals are as you as a professor for your life. Brian Keating:Yeah. So, my basic dictum in life is that it’s incredibly short, and you have to make the most of it, and you have to do everything you can until we invent time travel. We have to do everything we can in order to make each moment as meaningful as invested in with meaning as possible. And so I do that in in different ways, different habits, rituals, practices. But one thing I’ve always wanted to do is to write a book and leave a legacy as a as an author. And I’ve learned so much from other authors that I wanted to start something, especially during this time of COVID, to give back to people that have been my silent mentors or distant learning mentors, namely folks like, as you mentioned, Michael Shermer has been on my podcast. We’ve had people like, we we had David Kaiser, a very famous and and well known physicist, all the way down to people that have influenced my life personally that haven’t written books, such as Jim Simons who we had on the podcast for Father’s Day. And, again, following Carl Sagan’s dictum that books are magic, books are proof that human beings can work magic. Brian Keating:You have an author’s voice, possibly a long dead author from communicating from 100 or maybe 1000 of years ago in the case of you know, I read a lot of the bible and and things like that we can get into. And, how it influences me is, you get to create this sort of, artificial I call it artificial wisdom. We hear a lot. I’m sure you’ve had a lot of contact with people that study artificial intelligence. What I’m more interested in is artificial wisdom, namely, how can you accrue wisdom without going through all the experiences that other brilliant people have gone through. So I love to, read books. I love to write books. I’m thinking about my second book now as we speak and putting it together based on a lot of the interviews and, things that have emerged from the conversations with these luminaries that I’m really fortunate to talk to. Curt Jaimungal:How are you defining wisdom in artificial wisdom? Brian Keating:So artificial wisdom is just kind of a playoff on artificial intelligence, namely that, that you have bang awful lot of knowledge that’s available to humanity through theory, Wikipedia, the Internet, etcetera. But, and in fact, I remind people that the word science in Latin means knowledge. It doesn’t mean wisdom. Wisdom is the ability to synthesize fat pieces of knowledge in a way that we don’t know but may be uniquely human. And I think synthesizing it to avoid we we I’m also a private pilot. I fly tiny little planes. And one of the things we say is, you have to learn from the mistakes of others because you won’t live long enough to make them all yourself. So that’s sort of the, you know, kind of the 10,000 hour rule applied to pilots, which I think is one of Malcolm Gladwell’s examples of of, you know, truly outstanding pilots are those that have obtained 10000 hours. Brian Keating:And you can only get that far if you’ve done things and benefited from others’ wisdom. The situation that they’ve been in so that you don’t have to go through it. So it’s not just about knowledge. I mean, I think Derek Sievers once said, you know, if it was all about knowledge, we’d all be billionaires with 6 pack abs. There’s an abundance of knowledge. Wisdom is synthesizing it, distilling it, and catalyzing the many disparate pieces that you get into some coherent form of of of life message or with or vision, which is what I try to maintain. Curt Jaimungal:Have you heard of John Varecki? Brian Keating:No. I haven’t. Who’s that, Curt? Curt Jaimungal:Cognitive science from U of T. So plug plug there. Because I also interviewed there’s 2 interviews with him on my channel. Oh, cool. He extensively studies wisdom from a cognitive science perspective. I think he made Brian Keating:Yeah. I would definitely like to. Yeah. Okay. Maybe we’ll get in touch. You’ll help me get in touch with him. Curt Jaimungal:Them. Now you mentioned that the mind might not be the human mind might be uniquely predisposed or capable of wisdom that is the distilling of so much knowledge down to something that’s practical, which implies a goal, and then we can talk about what where do you get those goals from later when we get to the biblical section. Do you happen to do you think that the mind can be mechanized? That is what I mean is that a machine can simulate the mind. Brian Keating:Yeah. So I’ve had some conversations with people about this. And, actually, the most interesting people I’ve talked to are people, in the realm of music and the arts. I I interviewed a a controversial, but interesting very interesting person named Zubie. He’s a musician in the UK, that, he does a lot of, rap and improv based rap music. He’s also very knowledgeable about, jazz, etcetera. And I also interviewed a very my one of my best friends, Stefan Alexander, who’s a professional jazz musician, but

Extra Dimensions Could Change Everything We Know About Physics | Dan Hooper

Extra Dimensions Could Change Everything We Know About Physics with Dan Hooper Transcript Brian Keating:Is the universe igniting extra dimensions we can’t see? Could a graviton, a particle we don’t even know exists, change everything about the cosmos? Dan Hooper:The only particles that can move through the extra dimensions of space are the gravitons. Brian Keating:And what does the future of physics hold if the standard model should happen to fail? Dan Hooper:It would actually surprise me if the standard model of cosmology holds up to scrutiny over the next decades as we learn more and more about this piece of time. Brian Keating:I had the pleasure of exploring all these advanced concepts and more with the renowned cosmologist and physicist Dan Hooper in his former office at the University of Chicago. Now he’s moved to the University of Wisconsin Madison, go Bang, where I spent some time at the end of my graduate student career. In this thought provoking conversation, Dan and I challenge and explore how hidden dimensions and mysterious particles can fundamentally challenge our understanding of the universe. So let’s dive deep into the fabric of the cosmos. Brian Keating:Welcome to a very special episode of the Into the Impossible podcast with a colleague and friend and a past guest on the podcast, doctor Dan Hooper of the University of Chicago and Fermilab for now. Can we say what else is happening? Dan Hooper:It’ll be announced next week. Brian Keating:So something else is happening. By the time this comes out, it’ll be out there. We’re actually in person even though it looks like we’re recording on Riverside. Say hi to Dan. There he is. So this is dueling laptops across the beautiful dot eduroam network. So we have a new tradition since you’ve been on for your last book, Brian Keating:At the Edge of Time. What was it? Dan Hooper:At the Edge of Time. Yeah. Yeah. Brian Keating:Phenomenal book. Everybody should pick that up. 1 of your how many books have you written now? Dan Hooper:3 plus the textbook. Brian Keating:Awesome. And then the textbook is right here, and I was gonna buy a copy, but you saved me $75. This is an incredible, addition to the oeuvre of graduate student level cosmology bang actually covers and updates a classic that we’ve talked about before, which is, Colvin Turner. And I’m interviewing your colleague, Rocky Colb, tomorrow on the podcast along with Wendy Freedman while I’m here. You guys are blessed. So what we do on the podcast is we love to do what you’re not supposed to do, which is to judge a book by its cover. So Dan, take us through this wonderful book’s title. And, there’s no subtitle, but what does this cover? Are these epicycles? What’s going on? Dan Hooper:You know, I don’t know if it’s, like, literally Keating. But so Fermilab for many decades had an artist in residence, Angela Gonzales. She did many of the posters and much of the artwork around the lab. But she retired and then passed away years ago. But this is actually a piece that she did before working at Fermilab. And to me, it just struck me as evocative of cosmology, even if I can’t point to the objects in the painting and say, like, these are such and such. You know? Yeah. It’s more Yeah. Dan Hooper:More abstract. Brian Keating:I’ve been looking through a couple of your recent, research. I should also mention you’re the host of the, of the Why This Universe. Mhmm. Dan Hooper:Along with Shama Wegman. Yeah. Brian Keating:Shama Wegman. She’s in Columbia? Dan Hooper:Well, she’s in New York, but, she she’s, working in tech these days. Brian Keating:Oh, she is? Okay. Great. I’ll put a link to the podcast down below. You should all subscribe. It’s one of my favorites. But today, I wanna talk about a research paper that we read about as a way to kind of do, do the impossible, which is to kind of break down some of the most advanced concepts, which actually have some of their origins a 100 plus years ago. And that’s a Kaluza Klein theory in this new paper that you have about extra dimensions and gravitons in the early universe and how they could potentially decay. And I wanna ask you, first of all, Kaluza Klein, can you explain that in, you know, relatively straightforward terms? What is it what were Kalusa and Klein trying to do, and what has their legacy been? Dan Hooper:So it goes back into the 19 twenties. These mathematical physicists, Theory Kalusa and Oscar Klein, independently made contributions to this idea that you could maybe fit the equations of electricity magnetism, what we call Maxwell’s equations, into the general relativity framework that Einstein had for gravity. But to do this, you needed a 5th dimension. So the 3 plus one normal dimensions of space and time along with a 5th dimension. Now if you casually look at our universe, it doesn’t seem to have an extra dimension of space. So they tried to to make this all hold together consistently by saying, well, that that big dimension is curled up in a little circle. So imagine that we’re taking our macroscopic universe and imagine that if you went far enough in that direction, you’d eventually come out the opposite side. Okay? So that’s what we call compactifying a dimension. Dan Hooper:So imagine now that there’s a 5th dimension and it’s compactified, but it’s compactified in a very theory short distance. So you kind of go around in a very rapid circle and it’s so that circle is so small that you don’t notice it. This is the sort of thing that Clarke and Klein posited to try to make these theories play well together. Turns out not to work for a bunch of technical reasons and I don’t think it’s super enlightening to go into it. But jump several decades later and people in

Is There EVIDENCE for Intelligent Design? | Luke Barnes and Jay Richards

Is There EVIDENCE for Intelligent Design?Luke Barnes and Jay Richards Transcript Brian Keating:We share 99.8% of our chromosomes with apes. What we’re made up of makes up something like 0.001% of all the energy in the universe. To say that we’re insignificant because we aren’t as big as a gas giant planet, we share the same number of chromosomes as a fruit fly, those are empty soulless arguments. Peter Robinson:I’m Peter Robinson. A senior lecturer at Western Sydney University in Australia, the astrophysicist Luke Barnes received his doctorate from Cambridge. Doctor Barnes is co author of A Fortunate Universe, Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos. The cosmologist Brian Keating completed his doctoral work at Brown. He now serves as professor of physics at the University of California at San Diego and is director of the Simons Observatory in Chile. Brian Keating:Simons Observatory? Peter Robinson:Simons Observatory. Did I mispronounce both? It’s the Simons Observatory in Chile. Brian Keating:From the principal investigator of the Simons Observatory in Chile. Peter Robinson:I will never forget, and no one will anybody else. Doctor Keating is the author of Losing the Nobel Prize, A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science’s Highest Honor. Jay Richards holds a doctorate from the Princeton Theological Seminary. He serves as senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation and as a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. Doctor Richards is the co author of The Privileged Planet, How Our Place in the Cosmos is designed for Discovery, a book that will celebrate its 20th anniversary in, Jay Richards:August of 2024. Peter Robinson:August of 2024. Excellent. Alright. Cosmic Fine Tuning, Luke Barnes in A Fortunate Universe. The fundamental particles from which everything is constructed and the fundamental forces that dictate interactions appear to be fine tuned for life. You have before you a total layman. What do you mean? Luke Barnes:Well, the first thing to realize is that you’re made out of fundamental things, physical things. And one of the things we’d like to know as a general, you know, curiosity about the universe is why are they this way? Why aren’t they some other way? And a and a way that we could start to get a handle on that question is, well, let’s take our best physics and let’s see what would have happened. Let’s, in theory, just change some of the fundamental numbers. Yeah. Let’s let’s turn some of these dials according to our best theories that, you know, these dials can be changed as far as we know. Everything’s still mathematically fine. And what we find is that it’s okay. Some of the dials, not much of a change, but there’s a couple of very important ones that involve the the the particles, the forces, and and the universe as a whole, where seemingly rather small changes would make a dramatic effect to the way our universe would have played out. Luke Barnes:So, for example, you’re made out of a variety of very interesting chemical experiment, but change those numbers and suddenly particles don’t stick to each other. You can’t make complexity anymore. These are the sorts of things that happened. So suddenly you change this dial and and some particles that were would have held together, that do held together in all of us suddenly don’t don’t do that anymore. Things decay, things fall apart. So our universe, the ability of us here to do this, the ability of stars, planets, galaxies to form, it’s a rare talent. It’s not one that every universe that we can calculate, that we can imagine has. Peter Robinson:Okay. So am I allowed to leap ahead to the idea that it is all as if it were designed for us, or is that a very is that is that theorists that’s an unscientific proposition I suppose. But, so what do you wanna say? You wanna say, we should not just take it all for granted it could have been wildly different if even a few of how many variables by the way? Give me some idea. Luke Barnes:Within the standard models, there are 31 numbers you need to to describe the way matter works and the way the universe as a whole works. Within those 31, a lot of them are just sort of weird properties of neutrinos, particles you’ve never heard of and not made out of, so who cares? With there’s a core of, I would say, maybe 10, where interesting, dramatic, and often catastrophic stuff starts to happen if you if you mess with those dials. Peter Robinson:Alright. From the fortunate universe again, we go from the universe to this planet, or the difference between this planet and the universe. We usually take air for granted, but the density of the air you are breathing is 10 to the 27th times the average density of material in the universe. Luke Barnes:Yeah. Peter Robinson:So we just got theory, very lucky. Luke Barnes:Well, did we? There’s one point of Keating, are we in a lucky place in the universe? And and I don’t think there’s a reason to treat the surface of the Earth as a random spot. Of course, we’re where the matter is, where we are, you know, we’re made out of it. Peter Robinson:Right. Of Luke Barnes:course, we can only be in an environment where there is enough stuff for me to be made made out of, and I’m 10 to the 30 times more dense than the the universe, and that’s, you know, Keating worse with time. The, the point is is not so much that we’re in a lucky place relative to space in the middle of nowhere. Although, there’s some interesting things about that. The point is that will the will the universe that where we change these stars, will it make a place where there can be structure at all? Because you can make a universe. I could make it very easily. Just turn a dial a little big, and

The Higgs Affects Everything in the Universe with Matt Strassler

What is the Higgs Field?with Matt Strassler Transcript Brian Keating:That’s not actually what people wanna know. People wanna know how do things get mass from a field. Matt Strassler:Had physicists been wrong about the Higgs boson all this time? What if it’s not what we think, but something far more elusive? What does the origin of mass in the universe have to do with music? Brian Keating:The universe is not playing music. The universe is a musical instrument. Things happen Matt Strassler:on it. Music is happening. Is empty space truly empty? Or is it a strange sea with invisible forces shaping our existence? What if particles of matter like us are just waves moving through a cosmic ocean? Here today to discuss all these fascinating questions and more is theoretical physicist, Nat Strassler, who takes us on a journey into the unseen depths of the universe. We’ll dive deep into the mysteries of quantum physics, the nature of space and time, and how waves, not just particles, are actually the building blocks of reality. Brian Keating:I don’t think you can define any new concept without an analogy. You build on analogies in creating knowledge. Matt Strassler:That will reveal how the Higgs boson, often oversimplified, may hold the key to understanding all of the forces and fields that impact our existence. Buckle up, take your Dramamine, and get ready for a wild voyage on a cosmic sea as we take a journey stranger than science fiction where space isn’t empty and the cosmos just might be playing its own symphony. Let’s go. What I wanted to do is start with a reaction. I’m gonna call this game one of the games I like to play is Deepak or Matt. And I’m going to read you 2 quotes. 1 is from Deepak Chopra, past guest, many time guest, friend of the show, and one is from you, Professor Matt Strassen. And I’m going to ask you to tell me which is which or who said what. Matt Strassler:Okay. Here’s the first one. Vibration is the inherent dynamism of the universe knowing itself that creates the creative force that we experience through the universe as a cosmic And then the other quote goes like this. Like any musical instrument, the cosmos resonates with a pattern of frequencies, one that can be translated directly into the bricks of the material world, the quietest tones. The universe rings everywhere in everything. Okay. So which is you and which is Deepak? Brian Keating:Well, the second one is me. And the difference the similarities are striking, but the differences are also extremely important. The, differences lie in the details and in the fact that the words that I used are based on mathematical equations. I am essentially translating the mathematical equations of physics into a language that everyone is familiar with, which is the language of music. And so I would say that, you know, the the notion that the universe has something to do with resonance and vibration and music, these are not obviously new ideas. These go back to ancient times. They are one of many, ancient ideas. But this is an ancient idea which turns out in some way to be instantiated in the equations that particle physics have, have found really work for describing the world. Brian Keating:And their differences are as important as the similarities. That is to say, there really are things that are similar to what Mr. Chopra would say, but then there are things that are different. And, a cosmic is not one of them, for example. Matt Strassler:He brings up something that you make clear, the the origin of the word wave in romance languages comes from undulate, ahunde, wave. And he brings up, in Sanskrit, the word for vibration is spanda, which means the creative pulse of consciousness. So, there might be more here than meets the eye. I want to do what you’re never supposed to do which is to play a game called judging books by their covers. And you know you talked a little bit about probability and experimental level. You know, so they say don’t judge a book, but what the hell else are you going to go on? You know, I mean you and I are just meeting each other now and I wouldn’t have read this. Brian Keating:The pre publisher knows that people judge a book by its cover. Matt Strassler:They always do. In fact, if you try to sell this book which I would never do, God forbid. Let me see what it’s going for on Amazon. No. This is a this is just a wonderful book. If you try to sell it and it doesn’t have the cover, it’s worth 10%. And I always used to say, you know, when I wrote my first like, who cares? Like, how much dust is raining down on books, like, throughout Brian Keating:the like, it can’t be that. Matt Strassler:And, of course, you know, dust is the villain of my my first book. But I wanna ask you, can you take us through the title, the subtitle, and the beautiful artwork on the cover, Kind of Blue? I I was thinking of the musical notes from Miles Davis when I looked up. That’s Stephan’s influence on that. Brian Keating:That’s a connection. Yeah. I haven’t thought about that. Waves in an impossible sea is very much what the book is about. A space time, the the the essence of the universe is in some ways like a sea, but it has properties that no physical material sea could possibly have. And so it really is in some way extremely mysterious and, that seems an appropriate way to characterize it. And waves in that sea are what material things like ourselves are are made from. And so the point of the book is to explain how it can be that we could actually be made from waves and how ordinary life could somehow

Did JWST Just Solve the Biggest Crisis in Cosmology? | Wendy Freedman

Did JWST Just Solve the Biggest Crisis in Cosmology?with Wendy Freedman Transcript Brian Keating:Did the James Webb Space Telescope just solve the biggest mystery in cosmology? The discrepancy between different measurements of the Hubble constant has been causing a lot of ajda in the astronomical community for the past few decades. But Wendy Freedman, a renowned astronomer and professor at the University of Chicago, is at the forefront of efforts to alleviate and solve this cosmic conundrum. Wendy Freedman:Data are convincing. I wanna be convinced by data. Brian Keating:Known for her pioneering work on the Hubble Key project, the very reason the Hubble Space Telescope was launched in part, and her significant contributions to measuring the Hubble constant and properties of stars throughout the universe. Freedman is now leveraging the cutting edge capabilities of the Webb Space Telescope to tackle the Hubble tension head on. Wendy Freedman:The only way that we will understand how we’re limited by systematics is to make the measurements very precisely in each case. Brian Keating:With decades of experience and a deep understanding of the intricacies of cosmology, of measurements, of accuracy and precision, there’s simply no one better to shed light, if you will, on this issue. So join us as we take a deep dive and perhaps resolve the tension, the frustration, and the anxiety plaguing astronomy today, courtesy of the brilliant Wendy Freedman. Let’s go. Brian Keating:Wendy Freedman, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, your second time on the podcast. Wendy Freedman:Glad to do so. Brian Keating:Yeah. And thanks for hosting me in your beautiful office here at the University of Chicago. It’s, it’s always a pleasure to come here. I get to experience humidity whenever I come from Southern California, where you used to live for many theory. Wendy Freedman:I did. Brian Keating:Director at Carnegie. So we’re gonna talk about your your career and your current research and this really cool looking model in the background over there that you’re so intimately connected with. But the theorists thing I think I would be interested in talking about here are these recent results that you have, been participating in and leading to large part with the James Webb Space Telescope. So how did that come about? Because I understand from my friend, Adam Rees, who’s been on many times, it’s very difficult to get time on the James Webb Space Telescope. They don’t even know of all your accomplishments because everything is blind. The the the pros walk us through the process. How did you come up with the idea? What is it telling us, and how is it perhaps resolving the Hubble tension without the need for a psychotherapist? Wendy Freedman:You’re you’re right. It’s very difficult to get time on JWSTs, highly oversubscribed Brian very competitive. At this juncture, we’re trying to measure the Hubble constant more accurately than it’s ever been possible to do before. And as you know, there’s this possibility that there’s a discrepancy between the nearby values of the Hubble constant that we measure locally and what you get infer from measurements of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. So we need higher accuracy than we’ve ever had before in the local distance scale, because the microwave background observations now are so precise that we need to make sure that, locally, we can have a a comparable competitive decision to see if the discrepancy is real. So our, focus with JWST, and we wrote a proposal that depends not only on Cepheid variables, which we use, for example, with the Hubble Key Project, which the CHUs team also uses, but including also 2 other methods, the, tip of the red giant branch and a new fossil carbon stars we’re calling JAGB stars. Yeah. And the premise is that because there are systematic uncertainties in any method, they all have their own. Brian Keating:Yep. Yep. Wendy Freedman:The only way that we will understand how we’re limited by systematics is to make the measurements very precisely in each case. So you need distance indicators that are very precise internally and compare those. So that was our proposal to measure the distances to nearby galaxies that have hosted type 1 a supernovae. None of the methods I’ve just described goes out far enough that you can get into the smooth Hubble flow. The cure your motions induced by gravitational interactions are too large to measure it accurately at the 1% level that is now a goal. Brian Keating:Mhmm. Wendy Freedman:And it’s a very challenging goal. Let me ask you. I’m sure. Yeah. And and so what we’re doing is measuring the distances to the same C using these theory techniques. So we didn’t know, are they all gonna agree? Will there be 3 different answers? And will there be an outlier? Let’s see. And and if there’s systematics, we’ll try and cover that. Brian Keating:Any and so do the tip of the red giant branch, the carbon stars, the cepheids, do they have kind of orthogonal systematic effects? Do they share common effect systematic effects, you know, that that have to be mitigated and you learn something from one branch and apply it to another one, or are they distinct? Wendy Freedman:Well, the nice thing about them is they’re computers different populations. So Cepheids are young stars. We find them in regions nearby to where they actually form because they haven’t had time to, move away, diffuse away from the locations where they were formed. And so we can only find Cepheids in the disk, and these are young stars. The tip of the red giant branch, we can find them in the disk and the halo, but the advantage of the tip of the red giant branch is that you don’t have to work in the disk because in the disk, you have lots of dust, You have high surface density of stars, so you have potential crowding and blending of the objects, and that means you can’t measure

Accidental Discoveries That Shaped Astronomy | Chris Lintott

Accidental Discoveries That Shaped Astronomywith Chris Lintott Transcript Brian Keating:Professor Chris Lintott. Chris Lintott:The simplest possible thing to point Hubble at the same patch of sky for a 100 hours, and the result of that was that this tiny patch of sky was transformed into a field of about 10,000 distant galaxies. Brian Keating:How come so many of the greatest cosmic discoveries came about by accident? Should we communicate speculative scientific ideas to the public? Will we ever rebuild the public’s trust in science? And is hype ruining astronomy? Chris Lintott:Your answer’s in the question. Right? Brian Keating:I had the pleasure of discussing these mind bending questions with my fellow astrophysicist, fellow professor, and fellow YouTube and science communicator, Chris Lintott. Chris is involved in a number of the most popular science projects aimed at bringing science to the public as well as communicating them on his BBC program, The Sky at Night. Chris Lintott:I think we need to keep space open for early career researchers who, let’s face it, do the work to try speculative things. Brian Keating:In this delightful conversation, we discussed everything ranging from the origin of life to aliens in the universe to the origin of the universe intelligence how these discoveries can be best communicated to you, the public. You guys pay our salary through your taxes after all. So sit back and enjoy this conversation through the cosmos as we explore accidental discoveries in astronomy. Let’s go. Chris, I wanna start off with a possibly provocative poser to you, and that’s the following. Half of the discoveries that are so amazing in this wonderful new book aren’t confirmed, will never be confirmed, have been disconfirmed. Isn’t there a danger in relying on speculation and hype in astronomy as has plagued many other science branches? Chris Lintott:I mean, your answer’s in the question. Right? Yes. Obviously, if we accept this hype and so on, then we have to be careful. I do think one of the problems with the way we talk about science inspired me to write the book, which is that we tend to give the headline result. Right? And there’s usually some clever person on stage accepting an award or, you know, announcing a result. And it can seem like that was a very linear process. Right? That my colleague, Bill Kiel at Alabama, talks about the Hollywood version of science. And the Hollywood version of science is that we all sit in a big and surprisingly plush conference room. Chris Lintott:No one says anything. And then some somebody suddenly goes, my god. I’ve got an idea. We go, well, we should test the idea. And then we test the idea, and it turns out they were right. And the thing is that’s not how it works. And actually, that’s not the fun bit. Being right is never the fun bit. Chris Lintott:So I think one of the things I want to do in the book, was show astronomy in action, show show how astronomy works as an everyday subject, particularly from perspective of an observational astronomy. Somebody who spends their life not, writing equations necessarily and not building simulations, but somebody who is interested trying to get the best out for telescopes that we have and to see what’s lurking and often the data that we’ve already collected. So I think that can help with the hype cycle. Because if people, see the sausage made, then they’re more likely to understand whether to eat the sausage or not at the end is a slightly convoluted, analogy. But I’m interested your your question, I know you’re trying to be provocative, but which are the ones you don’t think are true? Because I think I would stand by most of the things in the book. Brian Keating:Well, I know you for a fact, Chris, you don’t stand behind Oumuamua as an interstellar garbage barge or or a scout mission from extraterrestrial intelligence. Unlike past guest and friend, Avi Loeb, you say quite quite clearly in the book, let me get the quote here, something that it’s been debunked thoroughly. So that’s extreme hype. I mean, we love Avi, but he’s not afraid of of displaying a little bit of of over Chris Lintott:But but but in the book, Oumuamua is interesting regardless of the fact that it’s probably not an alien spaceship. So the the result, you know so so, yes, I, you know, I haven’t decided it would be fun if it was an alien spaceship. Like, this is the thing that I think sometimes when we get talking about Avi’s ideas with people they miss, like, the rest of us want it to be an alien spaceship too. It’s it’s not that we’re sitting here going, no, I don’t have time for that in my schedule. Though, there is a good story about Jocelyn’s bell by nails discovery of pulsars where she ends up pissed off annoyed that, aliens might have gotten away for theory, but we’re not all Jocelyn. Right? Aliens would be great. So look, Ome and Mu, it would be great for sales, but it’s not aliens. It’s a sample of another solar system. Chris Lintott:It’s the first of the things that we’ve ever found. It’s kick started this renaissance, this new set of ideas about what actually turned out to be the most common macroscopic objects in the galaxy. We think there are 10 to the 27. So 1,000,000,000,000,000 big these things floating through the cosmos. And we’ve seen 2 of them. And that’s exciting. So to me, Oumuamua, the story in the book is that it arrived from out of nowhere. It confound us. Chris Lintott:It was perfectly sensible to consider the alien hypothesis, especially if you’ve read your rendezvous with Rama and the rest of it. But it turns out to be consistent with being a population of objects that we’re now going to get to study. And so I was so excited by

Science Education: What’s Wrong? | John Skrentny

The MASSIVE STEM Graduate ExodusWhat’s Going Wrong? | John Skrentny Transcript Brian Keating:You know that most STEM graduates don’t end up working in STEM fields? It’s true and it’s not due to a lack of demand. John Skrentny:We hear constantly about the burning hair on fire crisis level shortage of of of STEM grads. Brian Keating:Tech companies dominate our landscape, ranging from everything from artificial intelligence to smart phones, searching the web, blockchain and beyond. Despite the fact that these tech companies dominate the environment, the economy, and the looming global cries for scientific solutions from STEM fields, they’re not losing STEM graduates due to a lack of funding. We’ve in fact poured 1,000,000,000 into STEM programs. Yet despite this, up to 70% of STEM graduates choose not to pursue careers in their fields. John Skrentny:Some studies show about 50% of engineering grads leave before they’ve even gotten their first job. Brian Keating:So why is that? I had the incredible opportunity to communicate to share these ideas with my UCSD colleague who’s a world renowned sociologist, John Scrantney, who recently explored these issues in his wonderful new book, Wasted Education. I know it’s not going to be a waste for you to tune in, So let’s go. Into the Impossible, John Scranton. Brian Keating:Welcome to the Into the Impossible podcast where we feature for the very first time a a sociologist who is joining us all the way from the other side of campus. John Scranton. Did I pronounce it correctly, John? Close enough? John Skrentny:It’s good enough. It’s good enough. And that was a long walk. Brian Keating:It was. Yeah. And I’m I’m proud to introduce you to this building. We’ve never had we’ve had some socialists on. We’ve never had a sociologist on the podcast. And so I wanna start with a semi prerogative question, which is you make the case in the in in this wonderful book, Wasted Education. We’ll describe the the cover art in the book title and the subtitle in just a bit. But you make the convincing case that, you know, we kind of have this, very ambivalent, very ambiguous message that we send to STEM grad. Brian Keating:I’m a STEM graduate, and yet I claim Brian Keating:that, you know, graduate, and yet I claim that, you know, STEM is sort of our best hope. And I think you agree with it. Do we need more STEM graduates, or do we have enough and we need more sociologist graduates? I mean, where is the lacuna? Where is the gap in what America is churning out versus what we actually need? Is it in the soft sciences, humanities, or really in the step sciences? John Skrentny:That’s a great question. And I would say we need more educated people across the board. But I’m with you. We need more scientists and engineers. But the book is about how we need to treat them better. And too many are getting this great education and they’re leaving and they’re going to do other things. And so the book is really it’s kind of a mystery book, really. It starts with a puzzle. John Skrentny:Why is that the majority of STEM grads don’t work in STEM jobs when, we hear constantly about the burning hair on fire crisis level shortage of of STEM grads. So that’s the puzzle. More than 2 thirds leave. It depends on the data, but it’s always a majority leave. And I wanted to figure out why. And the big story is they are just not treated that well. And I do think, and I’m with you, even though I’m a sociologist, it’s the scientists and engineers who are going to save the world. Mhmm. John Skrentny:And it’s the policymakers who have to develop the right policies to allow them to do that. So that’s why I say across the board. Social scientists, humanities, anyone who can communicate well will help develop the policies to, you know, unchain the scientists and engineers or keep them using their skills so that they can save us. Brian Keating:Mhmm. How do you react to this statement? I’ve I’ve noticed and, actually, tonight, I’m going to see the world famous San Diego Padres play at the stadium, down at Petco Parkway and, watch them, you know, flail and struggle to beat the Milwaukee, Brewers. Odds are under 50%. John Skrentny:I can’t wait for this question because this was quite a segue. Okay. Brian Keating:I claim, we are doing the following. We in academia have set up a system Mhmm. Where to get, from graduate student to post doc Mhmm. Is easier than, you know, me getting on a peewee, you know, football team or a peewee baseball team. Mhmm. Continue the analogy. And it seems actually very easy to even get a postdoc. There’s such a dirt. Brian Keating:There’s such a hot market. And then immediately, it flips around to go from postdoc, which I’m gonna use in the analogy of this, into the baseball, of triple a baseball. So imagine, like, you could get into play triple a, which is almost literally it’s it’s almost a major league level caliber. In fact, a lot of major league players get bumped down to get rehabbed and work off their drug addict habits or whatever. I don’t know what they do. But but up in up in Escondido, they have a team up there. But to get from postdoc to faculty, we had a job search not long ago, 400 applicants, one position. Are we not doing a tremendous disservice just within academia by setting up this false narrative that you’re gonna it’s just gonna be the same as making a jump from triple a to the majors, when in fact, it’s more like making the jump from Pee wee to the majors. Brian Keating:It’s almost impossible. John Skrentny:Yeah. That’s a great question. So just to be clear, the book is mostly about the private sector. Brian Keating:Mhmm.

Pentagon’s Former UFO Chief Speaks Out on UAPs & Government Secrets | Sean Kirkpatrick

Pentagon’s Former UFO Chief Speaks Out on UAPs & Government Secrets | Sean Kirkpatrick Transcript Brian Keating: Is the government hiding evidence of extraterrestrial craft? Were aliens present during a Department of Defense technology test? Does Tom DeLonge have alien artifacts? And where did he get them from?   Sean Kirkpatrick: We’re doing peer reviews, and we’re getting people out and involved across multiple communities to try to to get this evidence on the table so people can look at it and understand what the conclusions are.   Brian Keating: Today on Into the Impossible, we have the first director of the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office or ARO at the US Department of Defense. Sean is a physicist and ex intelligence officer. His work has brought him into the public eye, especially given the increased government transparency and interest in UAP and UFO related topics. Sean quit his position as director of the ARO due to constant threats and harassment. However, even after he quit, the criticism and harassment only worsened. He actually had more harassment from US citizens than the Chinese and Russian adversaries that he used to work against.   Sean Kirkpatrick: The way you combat conspiracy theories and the associated misunderstandings that fuel them is fact and science and truth.   Brian Keating: So after 18 months on the job, Sean called it quits last December and Aro published its first part of a report that he and others had worked on. Today we discuss the world of ufology, the study of UFOs, the scientific secrets they may reveal, the personal and professional motivations for so many people that are interested in this topic. Today, we’ll discuss the evidence for extraterrestrial technology, UFO threats, Skinwalker Ranch, and skepticism in science and ufology in general. Let’s go into the impossible. So, Sean, we normally on this podcast do a deep dive into the cover and the and the subtitle of a book, and we ask what’s the artwork for. You don’t have a book yet, although I’m sure people are reaching out to you, with many offers. Maybe I’ll introduce you to my agent. But I wanna instead, go over an article that you wrote as, the so called US government’s UFO Hunter.   Brian Keating: And that was the title of the article. And the quote I wanna get your reaction to is this one, that you write, the conspiracist story goes something like this. The UFO has been hiding and attempting to reverse engineer as many as 12 UFOs from as early as the 19 sixties and probably earlier. The gray cover up failed to produce any salient results and consequently the work was abandoned to some private sector defense contractors. Apparently, the CIA stopped the supposed transfer back to the US government. All of this is without substantiating evidence but alas belief in a statement is directly proportional to the volume at which it’s transmitted. Sean, what do you say to those people that say that’s exactly how conspiracies work and we’re in the midst of many, many conspiracies? How do you react to the criticisms of, well, that’s just normal and and that’s how conspiracies go?   Sean Kirkpatrick: Then why are we fooling around with conspiracies? This is not the dark ages. This is, you know, back in the land of reason and science and thought. And the way you combat conspiracy theories and and the associated misunderstandings that fuel them is fact and science and truth. So if you’ve got evidence for a conspiracy, then then that helps to investigate what the underlying truth is. There has been none that has been substantiated for this. And everything that has been brought to our attention and everything that was brought to my attention when I was in that position as the director, we investigated and discovered that it did not come from where they thought it came from. Most everything was explainable through other documentation, other programs, other people that had talked to other people.   Brian Keating: You’ve, of course, done a lot of research as part of ARO, but also you’re a physicist, and I thought it would be very interesting to describe, some of the interest that, as I’ve made the case for, why physicists should be interested. How did you get involved in in this project? It it doesn’t seem to be a likely segue from somebody who was a, laser and materials physicist in the University of Georgia. What how did you get interested in this? Why should a physicist have any anything to say about this, this subject matter?   Sean Kirkpatrick: Well, so understand that as a as a career government official, as an intelligence officer, most of my last assignments, I was told to go do, not necessarily applied for. This being one of them. I did not apply for this job. So why did they ask me to do it? And the answer actually goes to, I think, where you’re trying to hit, especially for for the students that are gonna be paying attention to this. The difference between scientific investigation and intelligence tradecraft is actually very thin. There’s there’s a lot of overlap between them. And in fact, we have a field in the intelligence community called scientific and technical intelligence. And it is exactly what it sounds like.   Sean Kirkpatrick: It’s trying to understand what what an adversary, what another country, what anybody else is investigating through their science and technology programs. And you do that by studying them, studying what they are putting out in the in the publication, studying what actions they’re doing, trying to discern what are they actually researching? Why are they doing? This is not very different from that. You have an unknown observation or phenomena, and you’re trying to understand what is that. And is it a threat? And do I really need to be worried about it? Or is it something else?

Jim Simons: Life Lessons from the ‘World’s Smartest Billionaire’

Jim Simons: Life Lessons from the‘World’s Smartest Billionaire’ Transcript Arthur C. Clarke:Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Brian Keating:Welcome everybody to this episode of the Into the Impossible podcast, a production of the Arthur C Clarke Center For Human Imagination at UC San Diego. I am your fearful host, Brian Keating, codirector of the Arthur Clarke Center For Human Imagination, a professor of physics at UC San Diego. And, today’s a very special day because, I don’t often get to interview people that have known me since before I was born and, people who have played such a huge role in my life in particular, but in literally, you know, millions of people around the world’s lives, and that’s, none other than Jim Simons, doctor Jim Simons, who’s joining us from New York, where he has, been sheltering, I presume, for quite some time. Jim, welcome to the Into the Impossible podcast. Jim Simons:Well, thanks. Glad to be here. Glad to be here. Brian Keating:So this podcast is really a discussion of ideas with great intellectuals and thinkers, and I always like to get to know people a little bit better. Usually, I I ask questions about their books or or so forth. But what I wanted to start off with you is to kind of ask you if, you know, somebody, an alien abducted you and could speak English to you, and asked you, who are you? How would you answer that question? What defines Jim Simons Jim Simons:to you? Who am I, and what how do I define myself? Brian Keating:Yeah. Science, philanthropist, mhmm. Jim Simons:Well, I’ve been theory things. I’ve been a mathematician. I have, run, an investment fund and, now a, a foundation, a foundation that focuses on basic science of all strikes. So I’ve done 3 theory things in my life aside from, you know, having a couple of children, etcetera. And, well, that’s that’s been my life. Someone wrote a book about me, this past theory, and I didn’t want him to do it, but it didn’t come out too badly. So, you know, you can learn about me somewhat in that book. Brian Keating:Yeah. We had Greg, Greg Zuckerman. He was a guest on the podcast, a few months back. So, yes, we we we did talk about that book And, you know but I’ve always encouraged you to write a book, and, theory interested to to know what’s One Jim Simons:of these one of these days, I’ll do it. One of these days, I’ll do it. My daughter keeps urging me to to do so. I’m gonna retire soon from the foundation and then have more time to, write my memoirs or something like that. But, I don’t know what else I can tell you to describe myself. I think I, I’m imaginative. I think I have a lot of imagination. And, I’ve had my share of good ideas, some bad ones sometimes, of course. Jim Simons:In fact, when you’re doing science, you’ll be able to probably have 5 bad ideas for every good one. But, my friend, Lenny Baum, said, he said, bad ideas is good. Good ideas is better. No ideas is terrible. And, when you’re doing science, you have a lot of bad ideas. Ideas. But, you know, but you get some good ones if you’re a good scientist, and now those carry the day. Brian Keating:Oh, that’s great. And I I like to think about you, yes, as a as a ponderer, as an intellectual. And I I, you know, I guess, I I foremost think of you as a scientist because even in philanthropy, and even in, your role as a department chair and and your roles throughout, throughout the, you know, the the financial world, you have always adopted, it seems to me, a scientist mentality where you approach theory. Just as you said, I could replace what you said ideas with experiments. And you do many, many experiments, thought experiments, and some C succeed, and some are actual experiments in real life. I’m not just talking about the Simons Observatory, but I’m talking about, running, you know, running projects. And part of what I want to talk to you about today is this notion of of leadership in these different communities and these different hats that you’ve worn. And whether or not you think there’s some translation or some, skill set that you had uniquely, that made you a good leader of these industries or or professions, because people are lucky enough to have one career, let alone 3. Brian Keating:And I wonder, you know, were you just born with it? Was there something that was instilled to in you by your parents or your upbringing, your relatively modest upbringing in outside of Boston? Is there anything that instilled that, or is it just your nature that you were kinda born this way? Jim Simons:Well, we’re talking about leadership. Well, I have a lot of imagination, so I’ve come up with some ideas, that have, that have worked. But my idea of leadership of an organization is to hire the very best people you possibly can. And I have a good taste in people. Mhmm. And then let them carry the ball. And Mhmm. When I became chair of, the Stony Brook math department, I reached out for the best person I could possibly find, and he was your father. Jim Simons:Mhmm. And, I knew if your dad would come on board, it would open up the floodgates of, people saying, oh, well, this department, can really go somewhere. So, I spent a lot of time courting your father. And, finally, he said yes. And then I was able to quickly hire 3 or 4 other outstanding people. And, and we did that over the next couple of years. I hired 10 people the 1st year, 10 the second, and I think maybe 10 people the 3rd year. And by then, we’ve