#2023 - Brian Keating
2023-08-22 03:30:17
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Thank you very much for coming, man. And thank you for bringing all this cool stuff. What is this old-timey telescope? Is that one of those the sailors used to use?
That's my spyglass, yeah. This is exactly the spyglass. This thing is actually one of the most important inventions ever made. And it really is the reason I'm probably sitting here with you. It's the actual tool, not this one, but the telescope is really the machine that changed the world the most.
And what's so cool about it, it acted like a lever that moved the Earth from being the center of the universe back in Galileo's time.
What year did they invent it?
The telescope was invented around the early 1600s. And there's a popular misconception that Galileo invented it, but he didn't. He actually perfected it. So he took it from zero to one, basically. He took this spyglass, which was really never...
It's amazing. People were using eyeglasses for many years. And nobody ever thought to go. take one lens, take another lens, and go like this. No one had ever done that.
There was a guy, Ben Leeuwenhoek, and this guy, Hans Lippershey, they had been making glass, and they were experts at making glass in the Netherlands. But Galileo heard about that, and the original devices that they were making could magnify things two or three times at most. But Galileo realized, hey, I can improve this and then do what mankind has always dreamt of doing, use it to make money and use it for military purposes. Because with a telescope, you could see a ship in the Venetian Lagoon a day or two out before it would come on shore, and you could see it from the ground. So the distance back then was stealth technology.
This took away the stealth. It would be like turning off the B-2's ability to have stealth. So he improved it so much, it was just inarguable. this would change the world.
So when was the eyeglass invented?
Eyeglass was invented... You know, it's kind of cool. The eyeglass was invented in probably the late 1500s, these lenses. Glass used to be total crap. It would be like looking through a piece of ice.
today. These lenses are super clear and super clean, you know, modern lenses. This isn't a great telescope, but it's illustrative and we can use it to do things. But what was so interesting to me, it's just like a quirk of history, is when these lenses were invented, before then, you didn't... I don't know what your vision is, but mine's about 20-20..
It's getting worse as I get older, obviously. But before then, there were no standards for how good a person's eyesight was until they had, say, the Gutenberg Bible was published. So in the 1400s and 1500s, the first movable fixed type, where you had a calibrated standard, where you knew how big the type font was, and you could say, well, Joe can only see something at 5 feet away that Brian can see at 10 feet away, or something like that. So then they realized, hey, I can't see what Brian can see, or I can't see what Joe can see. I need some kind of augmentation.
And they would put lenses on. So that was in the original direction, directly from the Gutenberg Bible to glasses. And then what's so funny is the glasses then led to making a telescope. And then the telescope led to the Earth being moved away from being the center of the universe, which the Gutenberg Bible, you know, in some connotations, suggested that we were. So there's a direct line from the Gutenberg Bible to the glasses, to the telescope.
to then, now religion is not so centralized in the age of scientific reason.
Wow. So when they first started using telescopes, what kind of power are we talking about? Like when Galileo improved upon it, you said it was like zero to one. Like how many levels of magnification?
So a good telescope that you can get, and I was joking, I'm not a doctor, but I'm not a real doctor, but the only prescription Dr. Keating makes is that you should buy your kid a telescope. And actually the reason I said, the reason I'm probably sitting here with you, is because I became a scientist thanks to getting a telescope at about age 12.. And you can actually see something. I know you've been to, like the Keck Observatoriesies, and you've seen the night sky from there.
And that is wonderful. But every single thing that Galileo saw with his 20 power telescope, not that much.
Not much at all.
You can get one of those, you know, on my website. No, I'm just kidding.
But that was a big improvement. That was a huge improvement.
Because now you could see there were craters on the moon. Now you could see there were mountains on the moon. The moon wasn't this perfect crystalline sphere that the Bible and the ancients had talked about. It had flaws, imperfections. It looked like it had oceans.
That's why they're called mare, mare seas, the sea of tranquility.
You know what really bummed me out? What was that? When Samsung, when they got exposed for their digital zoom for the moon, that bummed me out. I thought I was taking a real picture of the moon. That's right.
I was like, this is amazing. There's what my phone can do. There's the flag. It looks so clear. Like, how do they do that?
And then someone took a photo of a blurry photo of a moon on a screen, and it did it to that.
Yeah, exactly.
So it cleared up the image.
It ruined the illusion. It used the fuckery. They should not do that.
No, they should not do that.
So, yeah, when Galileo, like, boosted the magnification from just a few times, that was sufficient. With just a two-power thing, like a spyglass, like a toy thing, you really can't see craters on the moon. You can't see that there's other, like, mountains and so forth. But Galileo really, because of the telescope, invented the scientific method, you know, of hypothesization, of observation, collecting data, refining things. And then a lot of people forget, the scientific method is predicated a lot of times on serendipity, like, just, holy crap, something happens.
He didn't expect to see mountains. He wasn't saying, my hypothesis is that it formed from the same planetary system as the Earth. He just saw it. Holy crap.
And what was the very best telescope that he created, as he made them better?
It only went up to about 20 times, because that, the ability to grind glass was always the limiting factor. He understood the mathematics of it, which was also part, like, how, what's called Lenz equation, how does that work? How does light get refracted and focused, and in so doing, bend and magnify light? And so he understood it mathematically and could prove it. But he also did something really cool, which people don't appreciate.
The Lenz in this telescope, I don't know, should I show it? Jimmy, tell me if it's okay. The Lenz in the telescope is actually bigger than this brass piece that surrounds it, okay? And that owes to Galileo's activity. So what Galileo realized is, sometimes you don't want to use everything that you have.
Sometimes you want to do what's called stopping down. So you have, you've heard of aperture stops in photography? So when you stop down something, it does something really important. It reduces what are called systematic effects, aberrations, unwanted effects. So instead of maximizing, say, oh, I got the biggest telescope, which is what, now astronomers fight about, my telescope's, bigger than yours.
He said, no, no, no, you want to stop it down, and now I'll actually improve the quality. And you can actually see this with your own fingers. So take your fingers out, Jim. Look at some light source. Look at these stars above us.
Make a tiny little triangle with your fingers, two fingers and your thumb. And then go around like one of the stars up there, and you can actually see it. Pinch it down to almost a point, and you can almost see that it will magnify a tiny, tiny bit. Do you get that effect? It's very subtle.
But you're actually reducing some of the rays outside of your peripheral vision, essentially, that would otherwise come in if you have any cataracts or anything like that. So what Galileo said is, no, don't use everything you have. Actually, stop it down, make it smaller, make it seem less efficient, but actually improve the quality, not the quantity, tremendously.
And when did they first start? getting them to the point where you get telescopes like the Keck Observatory?
Oh, yeah, that was, so. the Keck Observatory and the modern telescopes that we use today are not this type of telescope. This is called a refracting telescope. It uses lenses. The lenses change the speed of light inside of the medium, and that causes light waves at different angles to travel through different thicknesses and travel slower, and that causes them to converge or diverge as necessary.
Nowadays, that, so. this telescope was invented by this guy, Hans Lippershey, and perfected by Galileo. Isaac Newton came along almost 100 years later. Actually, he was born when Galileo died in 1642, and he invented not a refracting telescope, but a reflecting telescope of the type that the Keck telescopes you've seen are. These are telescopes that use mirrors to focus the light.
They can be made much bigger, and they can be made much more clearer, because you don't need glass. You just need highly reflective media, and, crucially, they can be supported behind them. So imagine if you made the biggest telescope of this kind, kind of cheap, right? So I only brought a small phone I could put on. Actually, TSA almost confiscated this today.
They were like, what the hell is this thing?
They don't know what a telescope is?
They were like, what is this? Are you going to use it as a weapon? But they can only be made 30 times the diameter of this telescope, of this little tiny thing. Really? The biggest refracting telescope.
So those ones that look like a garbage can in people's backyards?
Those are reflecting telescopes. The biggest refracting telescope is in Yerkes Observatory outside of Chicago or southern Wisconsin, and it is only 39 inches across. So what happens is, imagine you have a piece of glass. Over time, the glass will start to... Is that it right there?
That's it. Perfect.
I heard Jamie's good. He's the best. So that's Yerkes. That's CUNY, compared to what you've seen in the Keck Observatories, which are 10 meters across, 10 times that diameter.
Interesting. And what kind of power does that one have?
So you can get a telescope that has arbitrary power. The power is not the important thing. What's important is how clear and high quality the image can be. You can have, like the digital zoom, it could be... When they zoom in on your phone, say, you know, if you zoom in, the image quality gets crappy, but even if it says, oh, you've magnified it 300 times.
So you can magnify arbitrarily just by choosing the right ratio of the curvature of the lens and the distance between these two lenses. But to get higher quality, that Yerkes Observatory lens started to sag, and it has other problems. Light acts, no matter what, it gets distorted when it goes through a medium. It's actually getting distorted right now as it goes through the air. And you've seen this effect.
Here's my second prop of the day. This is a prism. This is a prism made of, just, like, ordinary glass, plexiglass, and that refracts light depending on its wavelength.
This is like the kind of stuff a hippie girl would keep on her desk, right?
That's right. You can make it into a pendant for your wife. So that is changing the color. The speed of light is getting modified depending on its color as it goes through that medium. The lesson is, glass affects the color of light, propagation speed, and it affects the quality of it.
It's called chromatic aberration. So there's aberration because of the defects, like a crack in the glass. There's also a defect that different wavelengths or colors of light will focus at different points on your eye or on a detector, and that's bad, because you want everything to come to a point focus. You want everything to be perfectly sharp and focused. And so these lenses, once they get above a certain size, they cannot be corrected for this effect.
I've actually done quite a lot of work with binoculars because I was trying to figure out what the difference in binoculars for outdoor activities,
hunting and stuff. Yeah.
And there's such a difference when you get to the higher quality binoculars. It's really fascinating because they both have the same, you know, they have different, you know, like it's 10x42.. So I guess 42 would be...
42 is usually the eyepiece relief. It's basically related to the field of view.
And how much light it takes in.
And the 10 is the magnification.
The superior ones, when you get to like the Swarovski, it's probably the best. Their glass is so clear. Exactly. Like if you look through a 10x binocular. that's fairly cheap and inexpensive, you look at it like, yeah, it looks good.
I can see it. And then you put the Swarovski's on and you're like, oh my God.
It's like headphones, right? Yeah. You can get like a piece of, you know, the stock headphones from your iPhone. Exactly. And you can get really high quality ones.
And so these headphones do not distort, because they're premium headphones. They don't distort the different wavelengths of sound. Just like the wavelengths of light or its colors, wavelengths of sound should not be distorted. And it's hard to amplify a signal of higher frequency or a shorter wavelength. So the net effect was, they realized you could only build a telescope using glass.
that was that big.
Wow.
But a telescope using mirrors, right now, in space, we've got, you know, the six meter diameter web telescope, which is, you know, six times bigger than the Yerkes Observatory. And that's in space. That's a million miles away from the Earth. But that's built with reflecting technology. So when you see a mirror, mirrors reflect colors independently.
It doesn't change the color. You don't see, oh, I look different if I'm in a red light versus a blue light. They have no chromatic aberration. They also can be supported from behind. With our Simons Observatory, which I'm working with some amazing scientists around the world.
This is a sticker for you. Wow. So this is in Chile. This is currently the world's highest operating astronomical observatory. It's at 5,200 meters, 17,200 feet above sea level.
And the telescope that's pictured there is the six meter diameter, we call it the Large Aperture Telescope, that my friend Mark Devlin.
Is this the VLT one that I keep hearing about?
No, this is the Simons, this is just called the Simons Observatory. So when our mutual friend Eric Weinstein was on last time, he talked a lot about this man, James Simons. Who organized and ran the math department at the State University of New York in Santa Barbara. But he's become a, he's one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the world. So this is a precursor observatory.
This is led by my friends Suzanne Staggs and Mark Devlin at Princeton, Penn,
irrespective, not respectively, but the other way around. And then the Simons Observatory on the left, if you go over just a tiny bit, Jamie, yeah, there it is. So if you click on the Wikipedia, there, there it is. Those are two reflecting enormous six meter diameter mirrors. What happens is light comes in from above, from the cosmos, reflects off.
the one that's tilted at a 45 degree angle here, bounces up to the other one on the left, then that shoots across here. Actually, let me try this. I'm a professor, so this won't show up on the screen. But then it goes across and it goes into that white little chamber over there. That white chamber, I could sit on your back and we would have plenty of room inside there.
That's over six and a half feet across. This is also built by Mark Devlin and his group, and detectors by my friends Suzanne Staggs at Princeton. And this is going to be the world's most sensitive and the world's highest operating observatory when we start taking data with it next year. But you see, it's reflected. It's supported from the bottom.
You could not do this with lenses.
And a project like this, at this magnitude, how many years does it take to construct something like this?
With or without COVID is the question. Oh, okay. So we started in 2016.. My friend David Spergel, who's now the president of the Simons Foundation, and is leading NASA's UAP Task Force. I hope we can talk about that.
at some point. Oh, yeah.
So David's. like one of the greatest mentors I've ever had. He and I and others, Adrian Lee at Berkeley, we decided, oh, we want to build the world's most capable astronomical observatory. And I happen to be very close and connected to James Simons. His original job was math professor at the State University of New York called Stony Brook.
And he hired my father, my late father, who we'll talk about later. And they were best friends for a long time. And then Jim Simons went on to become one of the most successful hedge fund managers. He quit being a math professor and said, I'm going to start trading futures and commodities. back in the early 70s.
Nobody did this. And he developed algorithms that to this day still return over 30% a year on investment. So Jim is, I think, the 26 richest man in the world. He's dedicated his fortune to two things. One, fighting autism, because it's extremely close to his heart.
And two, to solving basic physics problems in science and math and chemistry and computer science. So he's not doing applied stuff. He's not trying to make technology. He's not trying to make a better iPhone or something like that. He's dedicated purely to making the advances in pure science with no application.
So this experiment was started, we pitched it to him, David Spergel and I, and Mark Devlin and Suzanne Staggs and Adrian Leigh. We pitched it to him in 2016. And we got funding for it around that time. And since then, we've had COVID, we've had tremendous numbers of strikes and things going on in Chile. And don't forget, Chile is in the southern hemisphere.
So when we had our first wave of COVID, they got their first wave six months later, because it was out of phase with our season. It was a nightmare. And we can't just say to my graduate student, hey, come back in two years when the pandemic, or come back when there's a vaccine, or do whatever you want. We instead said, no, we kept it going. And the foundation kept paying us, and we kept it going.
So now we just yesterday, my colleague Adrian Leigh, deployed the first receiver along with Nick Olitski, who's a professor, right up the street here at UT Austin. They deployed this telescope camera and we're about to start taking data for the first time in our project history. Wow.
That's very exciting. It is.
It's insane.
And how much more capable is it? Is it more capable, but is it also the position that it's in in terms of the altitude that it's at?
It's a lot of those things. So the altitude is 17,200 feet. Oh. So when you're up there, you need oxygen. Like when you were up at Mauna Kea, I've been there a few times.
Like I get out of breath if I walk up a flight of stairs on Mauna Kea. When I'm at the site in Chile, I get out of breath walking down a flight of stairs. Wow.
17,200 feet.
Wow.
It's like being on the surface of Mars. You would love it because, first of all, the people there are incredible. They've been doing astronomy since a thousand years before our country was even founded. There were people in the Inca societies, the ancient Incas. They were studying their interpretation of the cosmos.
That flows through all to today, where they have prioritized astronomy as central to Chile's GDP.
Oh, wow.
It's such an amazing, exciting place to be.
That's incredible.
And so what we do there is it's such a high-altitude site. You're above half the oxygen content that we fill here at sea level in Austin. Up there, you're wearing nasal cannulas. You have to breathe pure oxygen almost all the time. Wow.
And if you don't, you'll pass out and we won't let you up there.
Nobody can just hang around, not even like Wim Hof, the ice man?
He'd probably could. He'd have to sign a waiver before I'd let him up there.
Yeah, he'd do it. I'd be happy to do that if I could be up there deep breathing on the moon.
It's got like insane ultraviolet exposure up there. You can. basically, when you're up there and you look straight up here, when you're at that altitude, it's like you're looking into space. Because when you're above that altitude, there's not enough water in the atmosphere to really precipitate out. Remember, you grew up in Boston.
Remember, some days in the past we used to get I grew up in New York, outside of Long Island. When some days you'd get this thing on the news channel, on the radio, you'd hear it, you'd be so happy. It's snowing today or whatever, right? Oh, we got a snow day. This is awesome, right?
But some days, they'd say, unfortunately, whatever, we were saved. It's too cold to snow. You remember, sometimes it'd be like it's just too cold to snow and you're like, what the hell? Why is it too cold to snow? So we wouldn't get a snow day.
in those cases. Sometimes the water can be, the air temperature can be so low that the water vapor can't crystallize nucleate and form snow. And that's what happens there a lot of the time. So it's so clear. It's incredible.
It's the second most incredible place I've ever been.
I've never been able to recreate my experience. the first time I went to the Keck Observatory. But it was, we just caught lightning in a bottle. And I remember when we were driving up there, we had been staying on the Big Island. And we stayed on the Big Island specifically because I wanted to go to the observatory.
I was like, I just want to see it. I keep hearing that it's insane. And as we were driving up the mountain, it was cloudy. I was like, oh, this sucks. We've got a cloudy day.
Oh, well. You know, we'll go up there anyway and we'll see what it's like and look at their telescopes and all that jazz. But then you drove through the clouds. So it was so high up there that you passed through the clouds and then it was just crystal clear. And I swear it changed my life.
Like, just looking at it that way, I don't think, I knew, everyone knows that we're in space. But you don't see it that way all the time, because I just don't think it's possible unless you live in some very rural area.
Well, you mentioned this. You said, like, it's a tragedy that we suffer from light pollution. So much so, you said, that we don't even know what we don't see.
Yeah, we don't. We have no understanding of what's above us and that the ancients used to see every single day. That's what they saw every night.
So much so that this is a beautiful picture that Jamie's showing. This is the Alma. This stands for Atacama, which is the desert that we're in. It's the driest desert on Earth. It's the highest desert on Earth.
It's, you know, 5,000 meters, 17,000 feet in the Andes Mountains. And this picture is showing this band that's arcing overhead. That's the Milky Way Galaxy. I'm a professional astronomer, Joe. When I go down there, I can't recognize the constellations that I know and I've known since I was 12 years old, because there's no contrast.
Like, every star, just is, like, blowing you away, and it's just magnified so much by the clarity and the distance and the remove from light pollution. it is a toxic, you know, it is preventing our children from understanding what the ancients knew. But the great thing about that shot, Jamie, if we could keep it up for just a second longer. So you see, on the left there are these two smudges there. Those you can barely see from Hawaii.
I don't know if you saw them. Those are called the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Those are satellite galaxies of the Milky Way Galaxy. Whoa. We're in the Milky Way Galaxy.
We're in this disk. And what I brought here, this is a representation of the cosmic microwave background. This is made by one of my friends, Lyman Page and David Spergel and others on the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. This is God's view of the cosmos, if you will. So this is what you'd see if you were sensitive to microwave vision instead of optical light.
So microwaves are longer than infrared light. They're longer wavelength than, um, they're shorter than wet radio waves and they're longer than infrared light, much longer than visible light. This would be your microwave constellation. In other words, if you could see, these are unchanging fixed patterns on the sky that are only visible to microwave instruments. This satellite made this image.
Running across here, this orange band around. it is the Milky Way, but as seen in microwaves. So you just saw it as seen in optical. So the Milky Way emits at all frequencies. You can't get rid of it, because we're inside the galaxy.
So this, as I say, this is as if God is, like, looking down. We're actually at the center of this ball here. We're looking out of that galaxy, out towards the galaxy. But we're on one of the arms of the spiral galaxy. Yeah, there's one of the gloves and there's a little telescope.
Something's horning into my racket there. Little Planet Factory, watch yourself. Watch yourself. I got the little telescopes and the microwave beach ball. So that's what the galaxy looks like.
And what is all that schmutz? What is all that blue stuff? I don't see that when you're in Mauna Kea, right? That is dust. That's dust in the Milky Way galaxy.
Put that back up there. Yeah. So, actually, if you go back, Jamie, to the Alma picture that you showed just a second ago, the Incas were a really fascinating culture. And, astronomically speaking, we look at the stars. Like, I don't know how many constellations you can recognize.
There it is.
But the Incas, they didn't use our constellations, obviously. They didn't, like, say, the Big Dipper. Yeah, the Big Dipper. Or anything like that. But they, instead, focused on those dark blotches.
Those dark blotches are not regions representing the absence of stars. Those dark blotches are obscured. There are billions of stars there. But they're obscured by clouds of dust. Basically like smoke.
Particles of carbon, of silicon, metals, I'm going to show you in just a bit. They pollute and they obscure and make opaque the stars behind them. So the Incas could see this much more clearly. So we can't see these from where we are in the Northern Hemisphere. But the Incas could see it.
So they made their constellations shapes that they saw in those dark, dusty globules. So if you were born back then, let's see, you just had your birthday, right? So you were born back then, August 11?? 11, yeah. So you were born in August, I forget, what's your sign?
Libra?
Leo.
Leo, okay. So, instead of being a Leo, they would represent you by what constellation, what dust blob there was, and they had names for it. There was a toad, there was a llama. My favorite one, Joe, there was a constellation called the umbilical cord of the llama. Whoa.
Can you imagine going to a bar, to the mothership? Hey baby, what's your sign? Umbilicus of the llama. It's just ridiculous, right? But that's what they saw.
Wow. And we can't see that today, not because of light pollution, but we can't see all the other things because of light pollution. But yeah, those two little smudges on the left, those are galaxies, dwarf galaxies, that are bound to the dark matter and the gravitational pull of the Milky Way. They're actually satellite galaxies. They're separate from the Milky Way.
And how many stars are in those galaxies?
A couple billion. We have a hundred billion at least.
You know, what's insane is the density of stars. That was one of the things that was so overwhelming, because I always knew there was a lot of stars, but just the density that it's as much star as it is black. when you look at the sky. It's like you're seeing a different perspective, completely different perspective. It felt like I was in the cockpit of a massive spaceship, like looking at it through glass.
And when you go up there, you probably weren't on oxygen because you were on a tour or something like that. If you go up a little bit higher, so I'm a pilot, I fly little planes around Southern California. But if you go above the altitude that you were at, it's legally required that you wear oxygen, or you have an oxygen provider, a pressurized plane or whatever. So you would wear a cannula if you're in, like a little Cessna or something like that, and they can get up to that altitude easily. But if you don't have oxygen on and you go up there, next time you go up there, you look up, you close your eyes for a second, you hold your breath.
I'm not suggesting this. It's not me telling you to do this. But if you do it, you will see apparitions of the stars. It will make you feel like you're tripping. Or so I'm told.
I've never tripped.
So because you're holding your breath?
Because you're oxygen deprived, the intensity of starlight and the contrast, as you just said, between the blackness and the lightness and the points of light, it will be essentially like you're basically out of your senses. You won't be able to process it.
I wonder if we're going to get to a point with technology that we figure out how to use some sort of diffuse lighting everywhere where we minimize light pollution. At least minimize it to the point where you do see stars. I think it really is a bad thing for us. I think it's akin to people not getting sunlight in the winter. They don't do well because they don't get vitamin D.
I think there's something psychological. There's a medicine to the awe-inspiring cosmos.
So funny you say that. I haven't met Andrew Huberman. He used to be a professor at UC San Diego, where I am now.
He's the best. Love that guy.
He's such an amazing contributor. His whole shtick is get out in the morning, see the morning sunlight. What I want to talk to him about, because he's an expert in the eye and the physiology of the eye, as well as all the other stuff that he does for his laboratory, but I want to ask him about astronomical things. We see that night sky. What will it mean to our physiology and to our psychology to have that robbed from a whole...
We're doing an experiment. Nobody knows what will happen, as you just said. What will happen? Will it be like sitting is the new smoking or sitting is the new crack? I don't know what it is.
But that's the point. What will it mean? There's something deeply into the human mind. The reasons the constellations have names is because there was no Netflix. There was no Netflix 2,000 years ago.
So people identified things and they could navigate. I can sort of navigate. I know the constellations incredibly well, which doesn't sound so big a deal as an astronomer. But most astronomers don't really care. They don't know the constellations.
Really? One of the jokes is like, don't ask me what constellation that is. I'm an astronomer. I always give them crap. I'm always like, yeah, if you were a geography professor, I'd say, where's Mexico?
He'd say, don't ask me. It's kind of ridiculous. But not having that experience and just like you and I remember what it was like to have it at some level, or we can go and travel to it. People can't in LA, but they can do something, which is quite phenomenal. With the same telescope, that you can get an actual version of this.
You can connect it to your smartphone. You can have a tripod. It's $50.. I made a video once. I said, this is the best Christmas gift you could possibly get a kid.
Because with it, you can see the same craters on the moon that Galileo saw. Light pollution does not obscure the planet. Light pollution does not make impossible. I'm not advocating for light pollution. I'm just saying, right here, in the middle of Austin or in the middle of San Diego, I can see the exact same things that caused Galileo to realize that the sun is the center of the solar system, using scientific reasoning and evidence based on observation.
How good are the telescopes? Say, if you wanted to look at Jupiter, how much can you see?
You can see a lot. What you can see...
You can see the shape?
You can see the shape that it's a planet. Do you know what the word planet means or where it derives from? No. I love etymology. Stop me if I'm nerding out too much.
The planet means wanderer, in Greek. Wanderer. What is it? wandering against? The fixed stars.
The fact that you have names for things. I always think it's funny. I'm Jewish. We have a name for people that aren't Jewish. Goyim.
It's not an insult. It just means non-Jewish. It means nation. Actually, Israel is a goyim, which is a nation. But we're 0.2% of the world's population.
What the hell? Why are you making up names? They should make names for you, right? But we have names. as astronomers.
There were only five things they could see that would move in space, and those were the planets from Mercury, Venus. Obviously, they could see Mars and Jupiter and Saturn, but they couldn't see anything else, so they named those things the wanderers, and they wandered against the fixed stars. Now we know the stars do move, and actually the whole galaxy moves, and potentially, we'll get to this, maybe later, maybe the universe, in some sense, could be moving in a vaster landscape called the multiverse, which we can get to at a certain point. But the planets, you can see them. But what's so important is what Galileo saw.
Jimmy, if you could show this, it would be amazing. Galileo, in the winter of 1610, in northern Italy, where he was living, he used a telescope, not any better than this. In fact, this might be better because the glass is better, even though it's a Chinese piece of junk I bought on eBay. But he mapped. He was able to measure Jupiter and see it, and hopefully we can see it on the screen, and he saw it as a disk.
So if you want to see the planets, you can differentiate them right now by the fact that they do not scintillate. They do not sparkle. They do not twinkle. twinkle like stars do, because they're extended objects that we can actually see through the same and different parts of the atmospheric column. That's what causes scintillation.
You know, like a sniper rifle? They correct for it. They use what's called adaptive optics. That's to avoid the thermal radiation from the Earth. Like you're shooting something, an elk or whatever, at great distance, there's thermal radiation close to the ground, and then the air is much cooler, and so you get these boundary layers of the atmosphere.
that causes differential refraction, which changes the color and the position of where the deer is, and that's not good, right? So they have to correct for that using what's called adaptive optics. Anyway, but the same phenomenon happens for the planets. They're so big. They're so close to us.
They're not bigger than the stars. Stars are massively bigger than any of our planets, including Jupiter, the biggest planet in the solar system, but because they're close to us, they don't appear to be points, and only points will twinkle. So if you want to identify a star versus a plane versus a planet, the planet will be the thing that doesn't move and doesn't twinkle. That's called scintillation. They do not scintillate the same way that stars do.
So what Galileo did in January of 1610 is he made a series of observations of the planet Jupiter. He knew exactly where it was. He also invented the tripod. He was the first person to... These things that we just take for granted, like, Joe, do you know that they didn't have clocks back then?
There was no clock.
You couldn't measure time. They had sundials, right?
They had sundials, but what are you going to do at night?
What was the first clock?
So Galileo tried to invent the first clock. It was actually part of what... a precursor to the Nobel Prize. It was something called the Longitude Prize. They offered a prize.
I don't know if you've ever done any boating or whatever, but when you're out on the ocean, it's extremely hard to determine what your longitude is. It's easy to find your latitude. You just look for Polaris, the North Star. You measure your elevation, and that's going to complement where you are latitudinally on the axis going from South Pole to North Pole on the Earth. But it was impossible to tell where you are east to west, from the prime meridian, unless you had an accurate way of measuring time.
So Galileo was one of the first people to try to compete to win this prize, which was worth, you know, like a million dollars. back then. in those days. He tried a couple different ways to invent time pieces, but the one that he tried to settle on was this use of the planet Jupiter's moons. Jupiter has four moons.
I came for that look, Joe. I came for that look. I finally got it. I can die happy. I got the look.
Jupiter has four moons, and you can see them with this telescope. I'm going to give this as a gift to you.
That little, tiny one?
You can see it, yeah. If Jupiter's out and you know where to look and you kind of use a little bit of creativity.
How much power is that one?
This one's about 12, 15 power.
So you could do it with 15 binoculars?
Yeah. You'll see what. you'll see, these four moons. But I wonder if, Jamie, if you could find...
I'm trying to find something that wasn't great.
If you look up Starry Messenger, Starry Messenger, Galileo, Sketch, Jupiter.
So what Galileo did is he turned the telescope to the moon in 1609, and then 1610,. there they are, Jamie, on the right, with those stars.
Look at that illustration of Galileo.
That's his handwritten. I've seen, a friend of mine owns this copy, a first edition of these books, and you're looking at it, and actually...
A first edition? The actual copy that he wrote on?
Not only that, yeah, the first edition, but it has his handwriting on it in pencil. Whoa. It's insane.
Oh, my God, that's got to be worth a billion dollars. Jamie, could you please go back to that, those illustrations? I have that, this thing. That's the handwritten stuff? Yeah.
Oh wow. I couldn't tell what this was, that's why I didn't want to bring it up. Man, imagine having a piece of paper that that guy wrote on.
Can you imagine? So this is, yeah, so this is a depiction of him showing, so Galileo's the guy with the beard, looking down like Andrew Huberman, at the guy with the white beard.
Look at that beautiful chiseled beard.
That's right. Muscular. So he's showing these Venetian senators in dode, because they were in charge of the military budget. So even back then, there was a scientific military connection that he realized, because Galileo was kind of a cad. He had a bunch of mistresses, he had some illegitimate children.
How dare you, Galileo.
He had a support.
How dare you not be pure.
He had a support. His brother is kind of a no good, Nick. But anyway, the sketches in the lower right show the planet, as you will see it with this telescope. And I'll let you know when it comes out. And those four little dots, there was an image, a couple of pages back, Jamie, that showed the planet as a disk, and then there are four stars.
And if you go back one, I'll point it out to you. Yeah, see that thing in the lower right, Jamie? It's a Pinterest thing. I don't know if that's, yeah, click on that. So here's a couple of, see.
it says January, well, it's hard to see. It's January 1610.. That's Galileo's handwriting. Wow. And Ionis is like Jupiter, okay?
He had shit handwriting.
Oh, I know, yeah.
I always thought people back then just wrote perfectly with feathers. Who knew how to read it? That's a good point. That's a very good point. He's got like a doctor's handwriting.
Exactly. So. this is his first major book. In the upper left, you see the sketch of the moon with these giant craters on it? Over there, too?
Yeah, so if you go back.
Click on it.
So click on that, Jamie.
That's his sketch?
That's his sketch of the moon through this telescope, essentially, okay? Now, the interesting thing is, see that big crater? That doesn't exist. Really? It does not exist.
The one on the top?
No, the one on the bottom.
That one? Doesn't exist?
Does not exist. Now, why is it there? He was a smart guy. He was an artist, too, by the way. His father, Vincenzo, was a beautiful musician, a well-known musician.
He was a sketch, I mean, it's hand-drawn.
Why did he put that there?
Because, Joe, he wanted to convey not only what it looked like, but how it felt. Hmm. He was conveying. And when you see it, you'll feel like it's like that big, but if you actually measure it, it's about 10 times smaller than that.
Oh, so he just made it larger than it really is.
To emphasize it. And what's so cool about that, if you want to know, you've had on, like, my friend Sean Caroline. He talked about the Higgs boson when he was on that the first time. If you want to feel what it was like to discover the Higgs boson, you need 10 to 20 billion euros, and you need a large hadron collider. Okay, good luck.
I don't know if Spotify's gonna, you know, hook you up there. But the feeling that Galileo had, you can have that tonight. You can feel what it's like to see things for the first time in human history, because it's your own history. You're experiencing it for the first time. There's no other scientific tool.
Nothing. Even the microscope, it's not the same. viscerally. You will be connected to Galileo 400 years ago, feeling he was terrified. When he saw those pictures of those dots, he realized what he was looking at was not just like some stars that happened to be next to Jupiter.
He realized he discovered another solar system, a system in which there was a massive gravitating object, Jupiter, and around it were orbiting satellites, were orbiting moons around it. Today, they're called the Galilean satellites. He actually named them after his benefactor, those patrons, the Medici, who were the richest, you know, people in that part of northern Italy. So he named, he was clever, right? He was trying to curry favor.
Sure. It would be like if we named the, you know, whatever, the Higgs boson, we named that after, you know, the European, you know, equivalent of the IRS, right? Right. He was kind of a kiss up, you know, in some ways. Sick of him.
But it had to save his life and he needed money, and so forth. Right. But when he drew that, he realized the, wait a second, the Bible and all teaching heretofore said there is only one center to the solar system, and it's the earth, not the sun. This is called geocentrism. Everybody believed that.
Aristotle, Plato, everybody had believed that for a long time, because it said it was natural that heavy things should fall towards a center, and the center that everything seemed to fall towards was the center of the earth or the earth itself. Therefore, the earth must be the center of the universe. Remember, the solar system was the universe for a long time. Then, for an equally long time, almost, the galaxy was the whole universe, and now there's the universe and maybe the multiverse that we'll talk about. So this was just incredible realization to him.
Imagine you, come upon this thing and you realize you're the first person in human history ever to feel that.
Is there any documentation of his struggle with trying to convey these ideas to people that had very strong religious beliefs? Yeah. Because obviously, it turned out to be a catastrophe for him. That's right. But what did he did he convey in his writing?
the frustration that he had?
He's such a fascinating person. I always make a provocative statement that we don't need English departments. We should just teach physics and astronomy, because some of the great scientists of history, men and women, were tremendous orators. They were tremendous writers and they could convey things through the written word. that was pure artistry and mastery.
Galileo would say things like, I do not believe that the same God who has given us senses to understand the world would require that we not use them, and I'm butchering the quote, not use them in order to better understand it. He would write things that he had discovered things, only as a way to open a portal into the universe, such that minds more astute than mine may be able to walk through this portal. And he was being a little falsely humble. But Newton was the same way. Newton would write as a great orator.
So you can learn a lot from scientific writing. So therefore, if you only had to choose one thing, I would take the books of Galileo.
In this geocentric version of the universe that they've, how is it written in the Bible? Like? how do they describe?
It's actually, you know, the atheists, so, I call myself a practicing agnostic, which I can define later if you like. But you had all my friends, Stephen C. Meyer, which is partially the reason that I'm here, I think. But to have the discussion about, you know, the influence of religion on science. And he made the claim that without religion, we wouldn't have science on this show a couple weeks ago.
In other words, we wouldn't have the tradition that we can, that the world is intelligible. It's not the capricious will of God's, you know, playing with human beings, as Greeks and others had identified. So the notion of, you know, how religious a scientist could be or how religion impacted him was very clear. He would say, he was a very religious person. In fact, two of his daughters were nuns.
And because of his, you know, I always say like, imagine we're living in a time where someone like Anthony Fauci, or, you know, Francis Collins or somebody, that they had, they were not only the scientists, the expert scientists, but they also controlled the government. In other words, the most powerful force on earth. at that time, at least, where Galileo was, was the Vatican. He never left Italy. He never left, Italy didn't exist back then, by the way.
They were only city states, right? Tuscany and Venice and Rome and so forth. But the notion, it was a Catholic, you know, band of jurisdiction and Catholic church had sway over that part of Italy and Tuscany where he was. He was very religious. But he thought that he could say things like if he proved that something scientifically was true, he didn't understand why that couldn't be part of the religious canon.
So he was surprised. In other words, he felt that the signature of God is truth. So if he discovered truth, it wouldn't be a problem for the, it wouldn't be threatening. But I argue back then, it was kind of threatening. Like if you started having a bunch of people say, oh, the Bible's wrong, we've been misled, and they're the government, not just scientific authority, they're the government, it could lead, I'm not saying it's good, but it could lead them to want to suppress that, right?
Because it could lead to insurrections, it could lead to whatever, and rebellions. And that could be perceived as very threatening to the state. But to answer your question, the Bible doesn't say anything about geocentrism. There are passages in the Bible, there's two famous ones. The most famous one is that Joshua, in the Battle of Jericho, he caused the sun to stand still.
And that, to many people, implies that the sun was orbiting around the earth. It certainly could be construed that way. But to answer your question, there is no real cosmology. I always say, let me ask you, I don't know how much, I know you've had some exposure in Christianity, but I don't know how much you've ever read of the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, but the beginning of Genesis, right? So I know that you're interested in origin stories, right?
So why is it that? a book about a nomadic band of Bronze Age peasants, why does it begin with the creation of the world, of the universe? Isn't that weird? Shouldn't it be like, there's something really delicious that you're going to want to eat, it's called a pig, don't eat, why doesn't it start with that? Why does it start with the origin of the universe?
Well, isn't that the ultimate question that a man would have?
I think you're right. I think another way to interpret it is if God created the universe, then it's kind of like he has title to everything, right? He then could make a claim that, look, there's no God above me. And think about the milieu that the Hebrew Bible came about in. It was pantheistic.
It was in direct contradistinction to the other great religion of the time, which was necropolism, which was basically Egypt. Egypt was a culture fixated on death. The pyramids, giant tombs, they had mummifications preserved into the afterlife. They named everything after themselves. They had statues.
Their Bible was called the Book of the Dead. In other words, in contradistinction to the Jewish Bible, the Torah is like the Book of Life, we call it. So, Judaism is operating under that, where there were gods, and the gods were within nature and they controlled man. The Hebrew Bible was meant to show that no god is above nature and controls nature. Therefore, the sun, everything was weird that the sun is created on the fourth day.
In the Genesis description, the sun doesn't come about until the fourth day. What's the day? What's first? Right. Let there be light.
Let there be light from what?
From creation ex milio. That's right. Right, you know? The multiverse.
If it's not from the sun, there is no light.
That's right.
So, what planets are we talking about?
Exactly, right. So, but getting back to the original question, Galileo was very religious.
But where does it say in the Bible that the earth is the center of everything?
It's very interesting. What ended up happening was the reason it was dangerous for him and he was accused of apostasy was because he was claiming against the doctrine, effectively, of Aristotle, and actually, Stephen Meyer taught this to me in a conference that I went to with him last year. in just a conversation. I always wondered why is it that the Catholic Church, Catholicism, branches Christianity, which came from Judaism, right? I mean, the origin of they accept the Hebrew Bible, right?
So, why is it that a sect of the, or say the scientific and technological elite of the Catholic Church, why did they want to support a doctrine which really traced itself back to Aristotle, right? The Aristotelian notion was that everything was centered on the earth. There's nothing in the Bible that says the earth is the center of the socialism, or doesn't say that, but Aristotle made such logical sense to the Christians, to the early Christians and later to the Catholic Church, that they basically sanctified and made Aristotle effectively into a saint. Wow. And so, therefore, it was blasphemy for Galileo to contradict Aristotle.
Wow.
That's incredible.
It's really strange, because, you know, Aristotle was a pagan, right? He was pantheistic, which is the number one law of the Ten Commandments, right, is, I am the Lord, you shall have no other gods before me, meaning that Judaism came to destroy pantheism and to accept monotheism and establish it throughout the world, and now three billion people are affiliated with it in some way, right? So, that was its key enemy. And so, if you, we didn't have a sun god. That's why, if God creates the sun, God, Hashem, or, you know, the God of Allah, or whatever, that is more powerful than the sun.
So, it supersedes it. God controls the sun to do things for us, and the moon to do things for us for our benefit, not for us to worship.
That is crazy. Questioning Aristotle became blasphemy, and that's the idea of the geocentric universe.
Wow.
That's amazing. That's really amazing. It was very surprising. Because didn't they recognize that in Galileo, they had, essentially, someone like Aristotle? Yeah.
A very unique mind that shapes its generation and many generations to come right in front of them. And like, no, you're committing blasphemy for being brilliant.
And you know what's amazing? Galileo has never been pardoned formally by the Catholic Church. Pope John Paul, who's either...
We really don't want to get into that. The Catholic Church is...
But that's part of the reason I became an astronomer. Interesting. Yeah. Galileo was my hero. I got a telescope, so I was born Jewish.
Both my parents were Jewish. My father passed away. But they're both biologically Jewish. When I was seven, my father abandoned me and my older brother, Kevin, and he started a new life. And my mother remarried an Irish Catholic man by the name of Ray Keating.
And he was a very devout Catholic. He's still alive, thankfully, and he lives on the East Coast.
And his family was 10 brothers and sisters. And they welcomed me into their home, and my older brother, Kevin, with such love and graciousness and just touching humility and big Irish Catholic family. They basically would call... They thought that we became their biological grandchildren, cousins, nephews, and so forth. Okay, I'm still close with them.
That's amazing.
And I became so overawed by it. And in contradistinction to that, anything I remember about Judaism from age zero to seven was just like, okay, well, like, you have to not eat, you know, once you can't eat that tasty bacon. It was all things you can't do, and so forth, right? So this was like Christmas, Easter, hanging out, like just boisterous 50 cousins at Christmas. So I became, at the traditional age that a Jewish boy starts learning for his bar mitzvah.
at age 12, I became an altar boy in the Catholic Church in Chappaqua, New York.
And I, at the exact same time, I was saving up money to buy my first telescope, because one night I had fallen asleep and I woke up in the middle of the night and outside the window I saw this huge bright light and I didn't think there was a street light out there in the middle of summer looking at it and I was like, wait, that's the moon. And there was something next to the moon that was like, it looked like a little fragment of the moon had broken off and was just like to the left of it. It was as bright as the moon, but much, much smaller. And I was like, what the hell? And this is in 1986, right?
There's no Google. And I remember like what it was like before the internet.
So I was like, what the hell is that thing? And I had to wait until Sunday. The New York Times used to print a section called Cosmos. And in Cosmos it would say like what's happening in the skies, there's gonna be this, there's that, you know, it's the first phase of the moon. And it showed a picture of the moon and some stars.
and like a map like this, but for stars. And there was a thing next to it that said Jupiter. I was like, what the hell? Like, I saw a planet? Like, I didn't know.
you could see a planet without a, like Hubble space, you know, whatever, or without a satellite. And so I just got really interested and I kept watching them night after night. And I was unknowingly, and I always joke, I have a pretty big ego, but I'm not gonna compare myself to Galileo. But indirectly, I kept doing the things that Galileo had done. Like, seeing, oh wait, the moon has craters on it?
Oh wait, the moon has mountains on it? And maybe I could measure the height of those mountains from the size of the shadow and knowing the distance to the moon. And the planet Jupiter has these four little dots around it, and they would change their position night to night. And like a lesser intellect like mine, you know, not intelligent at the time, looking at it, would have just said, oh, you know, Jupiter's just next to some stars and it's gonna move, tomorrow will be different. But no, those were, Galileo realized he was looking at a mini solar system edge on.
He was looking, if you looked at it above, he'd see these four moons going around like this, but he was looking at it like this, so they were kind of going like this back and forth. And it was periodic. And he kept doing it for night after night after night. And it kind of got boring in his book, the Sidereus Nuncius, which is otherwise an amazing book. But when you look at it, he realized, hey, it's so periodic, I could use it as a clock.
So he tried to win this prize, to invent the first stable, accurate clock that could be used by mariners on the ocean's surface, far from land, to determine the time difference between them and Greenwich, therefore determining their longitude.
And what's the mechanism that he proposed to try to measure these planets going around?
Yeah, so if you just plotted their distance over enough time, it was periodic, so you could just calculate it just like the moon.
Right, so what does that mean in terms of the actual mechanical clock itself? Is it just a calculated clock on paper?
You'd look up in a table like a database, he would have it printed forever, but you'd still need to see the planets and moons surrounding it. So he built, basically it was the first virtual reality helmet, it was called like a cephalophone or something, so it was actually a helmet that you'd put on, and then it had these two short versions of his telescopes on his eyes. Whoa. And it would. and then you'd go on the ship and they'd be moving around like this, and you'd try to do it, and it failed, he didn't win it, and it would probably make you totally nauseous.
Yeah, so you were wearing a helmet with telescopes in the front, and then you're supposed to stare up at Jupiter and count? I don't understand.
You'd just look at the positions and say,
there. it is, awesome. Wow.
Set alone, thank you, James.
That looks so crazy, if I saw that on the battlefield, I'd run, I'm like, they have evil weapons, they have satanic weapons.
And then, first of all, you can't see Jupiter for part of the year when it's behind the sun, so that's useless.
It's got a candle on it. It's got a candle. Yes,
that's how you can look up. it's hilarious. They didn't have clocks. Right. Forget about lights, they didn't have clocks.
So when was the first mechanical clock developed?
So the first mechanical clocks were developed, I think, in Switzerland and in northern Europe, Germany and Switzerland, there were wind-ups and springs and so forth. First pendulum clocks.
And what year was that around?
This was in the early 1700s. So it was finally won, I believe, the Longitude Prize was won in the mid-1700s. Wow. But actually, Galileo tried to do this from his youth. He would be in church, and I remember, even though I was an altar boy and I loved it, and I had good experiences in the Catholic Church, even though I abandoned it later on, as I'll describe.
But one day, Galileo was in church and the priest was giving some boring sermon. And Galileo was just sitting there like this. And he looked up and there was a lantern and some horse cart had gone through or whatever, and the lantern was going back and forth like a pendulum. And Galileo put his fingers on his pulse. And he timed the period of the pendulum.
And he realized it didn't change. It was constant. And no matter what he would use for the pendulum, as long as it had the same length, it would have the same period. So all the clocks of the same, all the lanterns with the same length chain, all the chandeliers, they were all having the same periods. But those of a shorter one would go back and forth faster.
So he discovered the law of pendulums. And he was like five years old.
Like those old grandfather clocks. Yeah. My grandpa's parents used to have one of those. It would swing. It had this brass thing.
There it is. And it would swing.
Yep. So they have all these things. He invented the first thermometers. Jamie, if you want to look up.
Galileo's thermometer. When did they, how did they discern the amount of minutes in an hour, the amount of hours in a day?
So, to get to a level of precision now, or then, to a few minutes or a fraction of a day, that was easily significant enough to make measurements of longitude. So the actual kind of level of precision, that didn't concur until the 1800s to get really good clocks. And now, I talk to, you know, people, Bill Phillips on my podcast, and Nobel Laureate at NIST, National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland, and they are making clocks that are accurate to one part in a thousand trillionth of a second. This thing will not lose time over the age.
of the universe. And this is a mechanical clock?
This is what's called an atomic clock.
An atomic clock.
It's optical lattices and they cool things down to almost absolute zero. But the reason is, the Earth used to be, the Earth was the first clock, right? The Earth turns around once per day, right? And the Babylonians decided that they'd like to do it in units of 60, even though we have ten fingers and toes. They did it in fractions of 60, 60 minutes, 60 seconds, 3,600 seconds in an hour.
Right, but why did they do that?
That's, that's your, that's your game. I mean, I don't know why they think about these things. I mean, 60 has a lot of divisors, and so it's convenient, you know, it's divisible by 15, 12, 10, 5, 6..
I mean, when they first decided, okay, right now it's one o'clock. You know, it starts right now. Like, what, how do you start the day? How do you decide? Like, it's very, it's fascinating that the whole world has adopted this system, essentially.
That's right. Other than military, which uses a 24-hour system.
That's right, yeah.
When you're, you think about that. the whole world just decides, you know, okay, we're all gonna agree. Yeah. You know, and then some places are like, fuck you, daylight savings. Exactly.
We're not playing that game. Arizona. Yeah. There's a few places like that, right? Like, Arizona doesn't do anything all year.
They don't play that game. That's right.
They're like, fuck off with your fucking pretend clocks.
We do things our way up here. I mean,
and then, you know, obviously, there's time zones. And, you know, from, with traveling, the way we do now, it's so fascinating because you could literally fly somewhere in a 10-hour difference time zone.
Or like Nova Scotia, or Prince Edward Island. It's half hours. Got half-hour time zones up there. Right, right, yeah. So all this is bringing up a notion of what's called calibration.
So I'm an experimental physicist. The hardest thing about doing a measurement for me is not like knowing what I measure. It's knowing how I screwed up the measurement. It's like, what went wrong? How do I know?
Like you said, how do I know what the base level, zero point is of this measurement? Right. What's the calibration? When you buy this cup of coffee, when you buy the black rifle, are they on it or whatever, how do you know you're getting exactly what they say? It's just printed on there, right?
Right. So I'll ask you. You're one of the owners, right? So, like, how do you ensure that? Like, how do you, have you ever thought about that?
Like, do you go in and count all the hours? No,
we had issues with that in the past. when we first started the company. we were getting stuff made in these places that do supplements. And so we were third party testing our stuff and finding things in our supplements that weren't supposed to be in there, like different vitamins. Like, why is that in there?
And then trace amounts. And it turns out it's contamination. Right. And that's a lot of athletes actually get popped from small levels of steroids that are in, you know, like protein powders and creatines, and things that they buy from, you know, kind of shady organizations.
my man, Fernando Tatis, he got nailed for that last year, right?
What does he do?
Oh, he's a San Diego Padres. He's a right fielder now. Well,
there's a lot of claims that people get popped.
for that.
Like Canelo said, he had tainted meat from tacos. Oh, they just happen to have steroids in them? And you look jacked as fuck? Right, exactly. bro.
Settle down, sir.
Do steroids work? if you're not like going to the gym? I mean,
no, no, they do not. But for athletes, they have a significant advantage and they allow you to recover much quicker. You know, it's, um, there's certain sports, well, if you go out bodybuilding, a sport, right? It's impossible. It's impossible without steroids.
Some of these guys.
Yeah. You cannot get to that size. You don't get to Ronnie Coleman size. You don't get to like Dorian Yates size. You don't get there without steroids.
My mother-in-law, my mother-in-law, um, tragically, she lost her, um, what would have been my oldest brother-in-law, um, when he was about 16 years old. My wife's oldest brother. And, uh, she dedicated her life to just like, just being the best person she could be. And she entered, she built her body up. My mother-in-law, I'm like emotional thinking about her, because I love her so much.
Uh, and she, she built her body and she did this as like a Jewish grandmother, you know, basically. Wow. And she's totally ripped. I mean, she's still in great shape. But this is like 10 or 15 years ago, maybe 20 years ago.
And I used to joke when I was dating my wife, Sarah, I was, like, you know, normally, like, take a girl out, you know, scared of her father. Like, I'm terrified of your mother. She'd kick my ass. But like, she never used steroids. She's, you know, it's not her way anyway.
But you, you can get cut, I think. You can get like low body fat, without taking legal stuff, probably. But you probably can't get. the musculature, is what you're saying.
Oh, you can get very big without taking steroids. There's a lot of people that are massive without taking steroids. There's a lot of people that have fantastic genetics. There's a lot of people that have just thick, heavy builds. You know, it's natural.
There's many, many people like that. Um, but to get to the size of a bodybuilder is superhuman. It's not possible without steroids. That, that is a science project. When you, when you look at these people that have just traps that start at the top of their ears and boulders, for sure, bowling ball shoulders, that is, that's not possible.
I've met many people that are really fit and look fucking huge and they don't do steroids. There's a lot in the UFC. The UFC, you saw the test, everybody. So they'll show up at your house at 630 in the morning, wake up, sir, we need a, a urine test and we need a blood sample. And they do that all the time.
and these jacked people don't get caught. They're either, they're doing it so sophisticated that even with USADA, which is the most sophisticated anti-doping program that we have available and very invasive, right? Cause it does, it's a real problem. Like it wakes guys up on weigh-in days and shit like that. It's not good.
And they're trying to not to do that now, but you have to make sure that it's completely, like you can catch them. So there's some short-acting testosterone supplements that you can take, that, particularly now, apparently there's some new ones that they, they leave the body in like two and a half hours. So you can take them and get an elevated level of testosterone. You could take them multiple times a day and it doesn't affect your natural testosterone production and it also doesn't show up if you get past that two and a half hour window. So there could be a lot of people who are just rolling the dice.
I see, I see. And how, how do the weigh-ins work? Because one of the things I was going to mention is, you know, to, to, when you weigh something, like how, what are you comparing it to?
The weigh-ins are sanctioned cheating. That's what it is. It is 100% sanctioned legal cheating. It's more than fasting. They, they.
use.
very sophisticated methods. This guy, Sugar Sean O'Malley, who just won the Bantamweight title. Dan Gardner, is his nutritionist, and I was actually just going back and forth with him on Instagram because I watched one of the videos that he did and I was like, that is really impressive stuff.
Dan Gardner is, uh, Dan, what is his profile here? So I think it's Dan Gardner. nutrition. And, um, yeah, G-A-R-N-E-R. So he's, um, they're detailing how they cut weight and one of the things they do is they eliminate carbs like very close out, and they, they do all these different things to water load, so your body gets used to, like, dumping water out.
a lot. There's like, it's very sophisticated. So when a guy weighs in, in this case, Sugar Sean, weighted at 135 pounds. He's 135 pounds for all of like an hour or so. And then he weighs in and when he fights he'll be in the 150s.
Wow. He'll be somewhere in the 150s, and that's mild. His opponent, Aljamain Sterling, is absolutely massive for the weight class. So Aljamain, even though he weighs in at 135 pounds, he's walking around, I've seen him walking around in the 170s. Wow.
135 is my birth weight.
He's a big, well, he's not that small. When you stand next to him, like there's, show an image of me standing next to him when I was interviewing him. He's fucking shredded. There's no way that guy's 135 pounds. I mean, a 135 pound person is a fairly small man.
Yeah. This guy's fucking jacked. And so it's a magic trick. The best at it is this guy, Alex Pejeta. Alex Pejeta, who was the middleweight champion, he weighs in at 185 pounds.
He fights at 220 plus. He's so massive. Like you cannot believe.
Okay,
so that's, that's, that's him on the weigh-in day. Okay, it's not him weighing in, though. So he's significantly rehydrated by that point. Is there an image of me interviewing him at the post fight?
Is there a technique to put on weight, health, like safely before a fight? And I guess he's drinking electrolytes. It's not safe.
It's not. It's not safe. Are you saying?
these guys are compromising their life span?
Yes. Okay. A hundred percent. It's very bad for your organs. It's very bad for your body.
But okay, so that's him. So look at that. That's 135 pounds.
How the fuck?
I weigh 200.. Yeah. So look at me next to him. He's fucking gigantic. And I think he's, if not the best weight cutter in the sport, him and Pejeta, you know, Alex Pejeta, this fucking guy, this guy, you can't, when he weighs in, I don't see the actual weigh in.
I go there for the ceremonial weigh in. And he's already put on probably 10 pounds of water by the time. So he'll weigh in first thing in the morning and then by the time, that's him right there. Click on that link right there, with me standing next to him. The one that you just had, with his flexing upper right hand corner of the, yeah, that one.
So that's him weighing in and his cheeks are sucked in and he'll gain literally 40 pounds almost between them and fight night. It's fucking bananas.
They did a study, I think in the 80s, with Olympic hopefuls, and they said, they made the following test to sprinters. They said, would you, would you trade the following, a gold medal, guaranteed gold medal at the next game, if it meant you'd die at age 35??
They all say yes.
They all say, it's like half of them said yes.
The other ones are losers. But I thought,
I thought about it in the context of the Nobel Prize. You know, it's like, how many scientists, you know, have these things? Because what are these, Joe? These are, we call them, like, we don't think about idol worship. Like, have you ever been tempted to bow down to an idol, Joe?
Not recently.
No. We have different idols, right? There's different things that we aspire to. But even people that aren't like in the religious sect, that think of themselves as atheists, let alone agnostic, but are atheists. They all have religions.
And I think for some of these guys, yeah, I mean, if it's sacrificing your lifespan, your health span, whatever Peter or Tia would talk about, what is, you know, what's it worth? I mean, is that high worth it? Like, to be champion for a day? Right. can you name, like, an Olympic sprinter from the 1980s, you know, besides, like, Flo Jo?
I mean, there are a couple, but I don't think she said that she would trade it. I mean, it's so transitory, and it's so applicable only to the small cadre of people within your technical network. Like, the Nobel, like, you can't probably name more than, you've had a couple Nobel Prize winners on the show, but can you name more? No, because you're not, I can name every one of them.
I can name Ben Rose.
That's what I'm saying, yeah. You know one, but you're also amongst the very few people that get to interview people like him on a daily basis.
Yeah, it's a god to them. It's, it's this thing that very few people achieve.
So, when you get this, when you win, I mean, I won a Nobel Prize, I mean, my book is called Losing the Nobel Prize, my first book. And, spoiler alert, you know, I didn't win the Nobel Prize.
Is this what it looks like?
That's a chocolate replica. Yeah, I know you won't eat that, That's 15 years old, Joe, be careful.
Why, you think it's bad? What happens to chocolate when you eat it? It would be a shame if I ate it because it's old. Isn't that interesting? Like, if you found old candy and it's still edible, like, why'd you eat it?
It's from the 1800s. It's just fucking candy.
Honey lasts forever, right?
Right, it does.
in the Egyptian farms, too,
because it's wild. Well,
that's the only substance that's made by an insect, which is, you're not allowed to eat insects in kosher, Jewish people aren't allowed to eat it, but it's something made by a non-kosher animal that you're allowed to eat. So it's kosher. We can eat honey, even though it's made from an insect. Like, you can't drink pig's milk because it's made from a pig.
Right.
But, look at this thing. So, the second commandment talks about not making graven images, or maybe it's the third. When you win a Nobel Prize, so, my very close friend and mentor, Barry Barish, he won the 2017 Nobel Prize for discovering gravitational waves. He'd be an amazing guest for you, by the way, if I can have the temerity to even make such suggestions, but he invented, or co-invented, the LIGO experiment, which was this experiment, one branch of it in Louisiana, and one's in Washington State. 1.2 billion years ago, in a galaxy we have no idea where it is.
to this day, two black holes were orbiting around each other, just like Roger Penrose had predicted, and they came together, and each one was about 30 times, one was 30 times the mass of the sun, one was 32 times the mass of the sun. They combined, and they made a giant black hole, even bigger, but it only had the mass of, say, 60 times the mass of the sun. So, like, two masses worth of the sun vanished, and it didn't produce light, because they're black holes, and the energy supplied by them did not go anywhere else except into making what are called gravitational waves, waves in the fabric of space-time, such that if one were coming through this room right now, I mean, you couldn't notice it, but technically it would make your weight go up and down, like these guys in the weigh-in would love it, it would make it go up and down, except it would take, you know, a couple hundred days for it to even change by a billionth of a percent, but it changes your physical manifestation of gravity. It gives you anti-gravity for a second, and then a lot, many seconds, and then longer, it makes you heavier, lighter, and that's what a wave of gravity is. It's distorting the feel and force of gravity.
Well, these two black holes coalesced, and one or two sun's masses of these black holes was converted into shaking up space-time itself. Wow! Then these waves of gravity propagated from somewhere, we don't know exactly where in the universe it was, they came to the Earth, it took 1.2 billion years to get to the Earth, one instrument in Hanford, Washington State, and one instrument in Louisiana, they registered their, the same event, the same exact signal, but separated by the speed of light divided into the distance. In other words, these waves of gravity were traveling at the speed of light, shaking up, and exactly consistent with the merger of two smaller black holes into one enormous black hole. Okay, so when Barry and his team, Ray Weiss and Kip Thorne, they won the Nobel Prize for this.
I interviewed 15 Nobel, on Thursday, I'm interviewing my 15th Nobel Prize winner, and, but I've interviewed 14 of them so far on my podcast. And we all, at the end of each podcast, I always ask them the same question, it's related to the name of the podcast, it's called Into the Impossible. It's a quote from Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Arthur C.
Clarke said, the only way of determining the limits of what's possible is to go beyond it, into the impossible. I always say that to each guest, I say at the end, it's kind of like my wrap-up, you know, what advice would you give yourself as a 20-year-old to give you the courage to do as you've done to go into the impossible? And I asked Barry Barrett, he's 80 years old, I said, Barry, what would you do? He said, I would make sure to tell my 20-year-old self to get over the imposter syndrome, because I still haven't gotten over it. I said, what the hell are you talking about?
You won the frickin' Nobel Prize. You're among, like, there's more people in the NBA right now, Joe, than have won the Nobel Prize in physics, that are alive. It's a very small group of people. At most, three people can win it every year. They typically win it when they're in the 70s and 80s and their life expectancy isn't super long.
Sir Roger's 92 now. But when you win it, I said, how could you possibly have the imposter syndrome, this fear of inadequacy, that you don't belong where you're at, that you don't deserve the accolades that you had? You won it. It was selected by 400 nerds in Sweden. that said, you are good enough to win the Nobel Prize.
How could you? He said, no, Brian, when you win a Nobel Prize, you get the golden medal, like Flavor Flav, you know, you put it on, and you get the million dollars or your portion of the million dollar purse, but they also want to make sure that you receive them. You're not going to come back later and say, where's my Nobel Prize? They make you sign a ledger. They make you sign, remember those old-fashioned autograph books?
They make you sign it. And he said, Barry told me, he said, I'm a curious guy, so what do I do? I look, who won it last year? I saw some of my friends and advisors. maybe.
Richard Feynman, wow, that's pretty cool. Marie Curie, Albert Einstein. His actual signature in this book, because it's only been around for 116 years or something like that. So, you know, goes back to Einstein, and he won in 1922.. When he saw Einstein, he said, I am not worthy.
I'm just some humble kid from Nebraska. I don't belong here. How can I possibly be in the same book as Albert Einstein? And I said, Barry, I've got good news and I've got good news. I said, did you know that Albert Einstein felt the imposter syndrome?
He's like, you're kidding me. How could that possibly be? I said, no, Barry, he did. And I looked up this quote and I showed it to him. I said, Albert Einstein called Isaac Newton not only the greatest scientist in history, but the man who single-handedly changed Western civilization more than any other person through the Principia and the study of natural determinism and laws.
And I said, but wait, there's more. I said, Newton had the imposter syndrome. He said, you're kidding me. Newton, he was like, because Newton was kind of a prick. Newton had a huge ego.
He was not kind to his friends. He tortured people as the master of the mint, or he had them tortured. Tortured people? Yeah.
Physically tortured people?
Yeah. Not him.
Push that microphone like so it's like in your face.
Okay. There you go. Like that. Yeah, you'd think a podcaster. He tortured people?
He was responsible. He was responsible for the equivalent of the IRS in England. So people would cheat. They would scrape down pennies. that's right.
I read that. He was the master of the mint, it was called. that's right. I forgot about this. He was also an alchemist.
He was an amazing guy, but he was kind of a prick.
And he had imposter syndrome as well.
So he had imposter syndrome. Now, who could he have imposter syndrome about? You might wonder. And if you read his writings, do you know what Isaac Newton, the creator of calculus, the first person to understand universal gravitation, discovered? laws of optics, do you know what his biggest accomplishment, according to him, was?
What?
He died a virgin.
Yeah, that was a weird one, right? Yeah, I was going to bring that up. He was celibate.
You know why?
Why?
Because there's only one way that he could emulate his hero. His, the person before whom he felt the imposter syndrome. And who was that? That was Jesus Christ. Oh boy.
So he wanted to be Christ-like. He wanted to emulate Christ. And the only way he could do it, he couldn't like fast, or, I don't know, he couldn't walk on water, he couldn't turn water into wine, he couldn't turn loaves into fishes, or whatever Jesus also did. But he could die celibate. And that's who he had imposter syndrome.
But the lesson is, Wait,
is this from his writing that he spoke of this? Yeah. Are you sure he just didn't, it was like an excuse for he didn't like sex? I don't know. I mean, it sounds nutty.
It's like, how do you figure that out when you're like 14, 15 years old? You know, you're young and full of hormones and you've made this decision to be like Jesus?
Yeah, yeah, no, it's, he was a strange guy.
He sounds insane.
He definitely was. He was not like Galileo. You would want to hang out with Galileo. No, I would want to hang out.
with him too, for a little bit, just to see what it's like.
So, when you win the Nobel Prize, you go there, and what is the commandment about idol worship? It's that you shall make no gilded, golden, graven, like engraved images. So who is that? Do you know who that is?
Albert Nobel?
Yeah, it's Alfred Nobel, that's right. And you know, he invented dynamite and he also died, he died never having been married. I don't know if he was celibate or not.
Holla.
So he was never married. But he established this, when you win it, you literally, the king of Sweden comes up to you and you must bow down to him. And he puts the gilded, graven image on your head. So, for all the trappings and all the 90% of National Academy members who do not believe actively profess a belief in God, this can become, at some level, a religion. And it's a kosher one, it's okay to worship, that's right.
Well,
the unattainable. that's maybe perhaps attainable to a very select few, is always the thing that people are chasing after, especially like high achievers. That's right. But many, many that I know that get there do have imposter syndrome, including MMA world champions. Like some of them, they get there like, this isn't real, this can't be real, I can't be the man.
Because they've set this up their whole life. And also, look, you can get to the promised land, but you can't stay in it. How many baseball teams have won the World Series, year after year, forever? I mean, even the Yankees haven't done that, even your Bosox haven't done that, right?
They're not mine. Okay, fine.
But for me, as a young kid, this is what I aspire to. And actually, as an adult, I wanted to win this basically at all costs. This became my, but it was acceptable because people told me, you know, like, if you discover these waves of gravity manifest in the cosmic background radiation that I study, you're guaranteed to win the Nobel Prize. And for me, it was a, I don't know about you with your, you know, relations with your father, but I had a very difficult relationship with my father. And in it, it was really predicated the way that some kids would like, get into fights, or, you know, with their father, or maybe they would try to be a better football player than their dad, or whatever.
My father was a great scientist and mathematician. And the one thing, the one prize he never won was the Nobel Prize. And so, after he abandoned us, this became kind of the way that I could supersede him. And it became an obsession to me, as well as being scientifically interesting to be a part of. There are very few projects that are eligible to win a Nobel Prize, let alone that I can win it.
But for me, it was kind of an added dimension that came with it. And that was, you know, like, a normal kid might have it with sports and their dad, or maybe the other way around, with your, when you're a dad, you might treat your kids like that. Like, oh, you think you can take me on, or whatever? And so, for that, that was the main source of driving impetus for my personal quest to get this particular title in my life.
That's wild. Are you aware of Ronald Mallet? Do you know who he is? No. He is, I believe he's out of the University of Connecticut.
He, he studies time travel. And he became obsessed with time travel after his father died when he was a young boy. Because he felt like if he worked hard enough, he could develop a time machine and go back and save his father. Wow. It's wild.
It's literally a Spider-Man origin story.
That's exactly.
This guy has been dedicated his life to finding a working model of a time machine. And I think, was it, Kurt Godel? Like, how do you say his name? Godel, yeah. Godel?
It's that weird, umlaut?
Umlaut, yeah.
How do you say it? Girdle. Girdle. Girdle.
It's like people that say Van, Gogh. And then they're like, no, it's really Van. Gogh.
I'm like,
excuse you.
Um, but he developed a working model, but it just required something like the size of the, of the solar system.
No, you're right. I know that. But yeah, he had a spiraling, he had a rotating cosmos where you could have what are called world lines. You could have your, just like you could walk around the surface of the Earth, and if you go in the same direction, eventually you'll come back to where you started. If the universe was somehow rotating in the way that he envisioned it, you could have it end up on a time start where you began in the beginning.
Yeah, I've seen that. Travelers, life-like, time-like curve. Wild. Girdle's interesting because he, he and Einstein were buddies back at the Institute for Advanced Study, like Oppenheimer. I don't know if you saw Oppenheimer.
I haven't seen it yet. Oh, you should see it. I don't go to the movies, but I do go to the movies. I saw Barbie.
Yeah, did you?
My girls are not old enough to drive you there. It's fun. I want to say, my friend Ben Shapiro, your former guest, he hated it.
I don't understand Ben. He needs to fuckin' have a sit-down with me about this.
He needs to chill out about that.
Everything's a goddamn culture war.
I know. That's what I love about astronomy. No one ever freakin' wakes up and says, see that comet over there? That's a Republican. There's a Democrat astronaut.
No, screw that. It's safe. You're studying things that are so immense and so spectacular that it makes all this stuff seem like nonsense. That's right. This stuff that people fill their days up with complaining about.
A fuckin' Barbie movie. Jesus Christ. I mean, that would be like someone who's a pacifist reviewing the Ultimate Finding Championship.
Exactly.
They hit each other too much. That's what it's for.
There's a joke about. Einstein goes to heaven and somebody comes up to him and says, oh, you're Albert Einstein and you're great. I can't wait to talk to you. Einstein says, first you must tell me your IQ. And the guy goes, I have 140 IQ.
Oh, we could talk about the math and string theory and this and that. And then another guy comes up, what's your IQ? It's 130.. Oh, we could talk about the stock market and we could talk about all these financial... And then someone comes up, I have 100 IQ.
We could talk about culture wars.
I think it's more of a tribal thing than anything with us. I think what's going on is just something that's written into the human reward system. That there's a lot of social value in being part of a tribe. There's a lot of social value in being part of a committed ideology, whether it's a religion or a cult or politics.
Well, that's what's impressive. Not to be too overbearingly praiseworthy, but, you know, there's a Yiddish saying, if you stand in the middle of the road, you get hit from both sides of the street. But you seem to defy that. And it's always interesting to me, if I talk to somebody, I talk to Noam Chomsky, I personally hate his politics or whatever, but if I'm talking about linguistics and aliens and communication, I'll talk to them. Or I talk to Ben Shapiro.
People just go, how could you possibly platform him? Ben doesn't need Brian Keating's help to platform him.
That talk is nonsense. There's only one way to find the holes in someone. I mean, how many revealing interviews have you seen where people were supposedly platformed? And in those conversations, you reveal, like, the way that they look at the world is very flawed. It's very easily pick-a-partable.
You could just, like, go through it and say, well, this is illogical. This doesn't fit in with your whole philosophy of freedom. Like, there's so many things that are inconsistent with the way you view this one thing. Like, why do you view this one thing this way?
I think the human mind hates ambiguity, right? I mean, like, no one would say, like, you can abort a five-year-old. Like, I mean, I hope so. There are people. There's a guy in print.
Anyway, I don't know.
I'm sure there's.
a few persons out there. You know, my dad used to say when I was 30, he's like, I believe in abortion up until the 33rd trimester, you know.
But, you know, but on the other hand, you know, no one say, like, before the parents meet, like, you can't have it. Like, it doesn't make sense, right? So there's clear-cut benefits to being polarized, because it simplifies, it, gives you a hack, an algorithm. Say, like, I can easily say, well, you should not have an abortion. So, therefore, I must be in the people that say you should never have an abortion.
Or, like, gun control. Like, should you have, like, you know, an AK-47?? Maybe. Should you have a tow, a tank operator? Probably not.
Should you have a little boy? Well, you have a little boy. Fat man. None of that kind, right?
They're not that explosive.
So I think that, but it's because human beings hate these Schrodinger kind of, like, ambiguities. They just hate them. And so they must cleave to the direction that they understand.
Yeah. It's a very unfortunate thing that doesn't get taught out of people. Instead of that, we teach them to subscribe to whatever ideology the teacher is promoting. You know? And I think that's a real issue with people.
We need to give people the space to figure out things for themselves and decide how they view all these different subjects. Not, have this predetermined group of questions and answers that you, you know, these are, they're a part of the ideology. You must subscribe to them wholeheartedly, wholesale.
And even by you, like, apparently, so Lex mentioned that Andrew Huberman's Wikipedia page, because you platformed RF. I'm like, the guys at Kennedy, okay, first of all, he's a Democrat.
Well, this is all that happened. If you don't, Andrew Huberman commented on a post that I made about Robert Kennedy Jr., he said, I think this is great. I hope more presidential candidates do long-form podcasts. That's it. So Wikipedia removed the research section of his page.
He's got 70 public published papers.
He's highly cited.
He's very well-respected. And they removed that because they had decided that they were going to, I don't know what their thought process was, what their motivation was, but it appears that what they're doing is punishing him for what he said. They're maligning him in multiple different ways.
I thought about saying like, well, you know who else Joe Rogan had on? This guy named Peter Hotez.
Yeah. Well, I try to have a lot of people on. But there's nothing wrong with having a guy who's running for president on a podcast to discuss things. Like, what are you talking about? It's nonsense.
Yeah. And the way they did that to Huberman, when he was just saying that he hopes more presidential candidates. do long-form broadcasts, that's, you can't do that. That's like, that's tyrants. do shit like that.
That's horrible.
If I could, you know, indulge your, you know, forbearance, you know, because how often do I, first time I ever met you, but trying to study, you know, how to be a better podcaster, to be better at my, you know, microscopic emulation, right? So I have on all different types of people. But sometimes I have on people and look, I'm a scientist. I'm not a podcaster. I'm a tenured professor of physics at a major university, right?
So it's not my data. But nevertheless, I feel like I owe it to people to translate what my fellow scientists are doing into layman's terms that they can understand because they pay our frickin' salaries.
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