Keating, Brian

experimental cosmologist, UC San Diego; author of Losing the Nobel Prize and Into the Impossible; host of the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE podcast

Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize

Lex Fridman Podcast · Jan 18, 2022

• Brian Keating
• BICEP1/BICEP2 and cosmic microwave background polarization
• cosmic inflation vs. bouncing cosmology
• Andrew Lange and Nobel Prize heartbreak
• galactic dust contamination controversy
• the Assayer project and testable theories of everything
• Eric Weinstein and geometric unity critique
• panspermia and extraterrestrial life skepticism
• Ernest Becker and denial of death
• science media hype cycle

Core ideas

Keating frames the telescope as history's most consequential measurement device — not invented by Galileo (credited to Hans Lippershey) but transformed by his roughly tenfold improvement, which let humanity replicate direct sensory discovery (seeing Jupiter's moons, Saturn's "ears") in a way he argues no other science, including particle physics, allows a person to viscerally experience firsthand. He explains that radio telescopes work thermodynamically — a detector placed at a telescope's focus comes to the same temperature as the object observed, effectively "teleporting" a remote temperature measurement — and traces this principle to the serendipitous 1965 discovery of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) by Penzias and Wilson at Bell Labs, who were trying to eliminate persistent background noise in early satellite communications and instead found the universe's residual heat (a discovery that won the first Nobel Prize awarded for cosmology, in 1978).

On the universe's origin, Keating explains current cosmology can characterize the universe from roughly the first three minutes onward (when light elements like hydrogen and helium formed via primordial nucleosynthesis) with high precision — the universe's age is measured at 13.8 billion years to roughly half a percent accuracy, derived from the Hubble constant and the observed recession velocities of distant galaxies — but states plainly that physics has no answer for what preceded that, since the standard "singularity" origin (shared by the Big Bang and black hole cores) is inherently unobservable. He surveys alternatives to a singular Big Bang, including inflation (the dominant paradigm, which explains cosmic flatness but not its own initial conditions) and bouncing/cyclic cosmologies championed by Paul Steinhardt — a co-founder of inflation theory who now, in Keating's account, actively argues inflation is "baroque, pernicious, dangerous" because it robustly predicts an eternally self-reproducing multiverse, a consequence Keating says places much of cosmology's most talked-about implications outside the reach of experimental falsification. He explains why the observable universe (~90 billion light-years across) can appear larger than its age times the speed of light would suggest — because space itself has been expanding as ancient light travels through it — and uses a physical demonstration (birefringent calcite crystals and polarizing filters) to explain how his BICEP experiments were designed to detect a specific, extremely faint (nanokelvin-scale) polarization pattern in the CMB that would serve as indirect evidence of primordial gravitational waves from cosmic inflation.

Keating recounts the personal and professional stakes behind BICEP1/BICEP2 in unusually candid terms: an ambition partly fueled by rivalry with his mathematician father (who never won a Nobel Prize), described alongside his own religiously mixed, unconventional childhood (born to secular Jewish parents, later adopted into a Catholic family and briefly training as an altar boy before choosing astronomy over religious life at 13). He describes being fired from his first Stanford postdoc for prioritizing his own big cosmological ideas over his employer's research agenda — which indirectly led him to Caltech and mentor Andrew Lange, whom he credits as a formative scientific and personal father figure. He describes the devastating impact of Lange's suicide in January 2010, which coincided with Keating being excluded from leadership of the upgraded BICEP2 collaboration, framing this as both a profound personal loss and a professional "betrayal" that he processes with considerable ambivalence given the scale of his own grief relative to Lange's family's loss. He recounts BICEP2's March 2014 announcement — made via press conference before peer review — that the team had detected inflationary gravitational-wave signatures, a result later shown to be fully explained by polarized emission from galactic dust rather than cosmological signal, ultimately denying the (unnamed-by-him-here) surviving team credit for what would have been a near-certain Nobel Prize; Keating argues the broader "science media complex" systematically over-hypes such initial dramatic claims while burying subsequent retractions, and proposes that science funders should reserve equal publicity budgets for retractions as for initial announcements.

Reflecting on the Nobel Prize itself, Keating discusses his own recognition that pursuing the prize was, in retrospect, partly an unhealthy proxy for confronting mortality (drawing on Ernest Becker's "denial of death" framework), and recounts being invited to formally nominate the 2015 physics Nobel laureates (for gravitational-wave detection) despite having no chance of winning it himself — noting the irony that his mentor's collaborator Barry Barish won the prize partly due to contingent events (a cancelled supercollider project, and the timing of a black-hole merger detection relative to the nomination deadline) rather than pure merit, and that a third LIGO co-founder, Ronald Drever, died before he could be honored. He argues the Nobel Prize's scarcity (limited to three living recipients) and academia's broader zero-sum incentive structures corrode collegiality and prevent scientists from genuinely celebrating each other's work, contrasting this unfavorably with what he describes as Joe Rogan's and podcasting culture's more generous, mutually-promotional norms.

On contested figures in theoretical physics, Keating offers a qualified defense of Eric Weinstein's ambitious "geometric unity" theory of everything, praising Weinstein's intellectual generosity toward rival theorists (Stephen Wolfram, Garrett Lisi) while gently pushing back — in the conversation — on treating unestablished track records as equivalent to proven expertise, and criticizes what he sees as excessive, sometimes ad hominem hostility toward unconventional physics ideas generally, contrasted with the comparatively uncritical "pass" he says mainstream figures like Ed Witten or Juan Maldacena receive for similarly speculative claims (e.g., about M-theory or AdS/CFT) given their institutional standing. He proposes his own "Assayer" project (named after Galileo's book of the same name) as a framework for applying explicit, testable, Bayesian-style scrutiny to competing "theories of everything," arguing physicists should prioritize theories' falsifiable predictions over post-hoc retrodictions, and should pursue cheaper, low-energy tabletop tests of high-energy phenomena (citing cosmic mergers and supernovae as natural test-beds) rather than assuming ever-larger colliders are the only path forward.

On extraterrestrial life, Keating states he is personally skeptical that advanced technological civilizations exist elsewhere in the observable universe (setting up an extended, good-natured disagreement referenced with fellow guest Lee Cronin's more optimistic views), reasoning that life's origin (as opposed to its later interplanetary spread via panspermia) may be an extraordinarily improbable event requiring many independent low-probability preconditions (a stable moon, a nearby Jupiter, dinosaurs and fossil fuels enabling technological civilization, etc.), and argues provocatively that even confirmed discovery of extraterrestrial microbial life would likely change human behavior and priorities far less than commonly assumed, given how casually humanity already disregards known Earth-bound life and its own moral failures. He closes with reflections on meaning, mortality, and his own religious agnosticism — describing awareness of mortality (echoing Ernest Becker) as uniquely human, describing a personal framework where meaning derives from investing in relationships and pursuits whose loss would be devastating (framed via an network-theory analogy for relationship value), and describing his tentative, non-doctrinal openness to something like "clues" of transcendent order in the elegance of physical law, without committing to conventional theism.

Excerpts