All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 8, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:00:51
Brian Keating | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 67
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
When you talk about, you know, is something science, does it follow the centuries-old scientific method?
Which actually traces back to my intellectual hero Galileo.
Now, Galileo made some huge whoppers.
I mean, he believed that, you know, certain crazy things about the universe that we now know are false.
and it's too bad because he could have had a good career.
Hey, hey, and welcome.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
We're joined today by Brian Keating.
He's Distinguished Professor of Physics at the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences in the Department of Physics at the University of California, San Diego.
He's also the author of the brand new book, Losing at the Nobel Prize.
Brian, thanks so much for stopping by.
I really appreciate it.
It's a great pleasure and an honor to be here, Ben.
Well, so I just listed off a bunch of your credentials.
Obviously, you science for a living.
Yes, I do.
So science is your thing, and yet you are also a religious believer.
And I was wondering if we could start off by you sort of explaining your religious journey, because you weren't always a religious believer.
It wasn't like you started off super religious and then you went into science and just remained religious.
You have sort of a journey.
Yeah, I have a pretty eclectic journey.
I started off as a born Jewish, but two Jewish parents, and grew up in New York, and eventually, after my parents separated, got divorced, we moved to Westchester County, New York.
And my stepfather is an Irish Catholic gentleman, and his family background is all devout Irish Catholic.
Ten brothers and sisters, you know, the full route.
And I became very captivated with that religion, and actually went so far as to convert my mother and my brother and I, we converted to Catholicism from Judaism.
To become members of a church where my stepfather had been going.
And I took it so far I became an altar boy.
So I actually became an altar boy at the age when most Jewish boys are training for their bar mitzvah.
So I've actually never had a bar mitzvah, an official bar mitzvah.
And at that time I was an altar boy.
And it was actually one of the best experiences of my life because I actually encountered things, you know, Growing up Jewish, it's great.
You have Hanukkah.
Okay, so you get a matchbox car.
You get a pair of slacks.
And Christmas was wonderful.
And the family was huge and wonderful.
And we were those kind of two-day-a-year Jews anyway.
Before that, we'd go on Christmas and Easter to the synagogue.
No, we would go kind of Rosh Hashanah.
And that was it.
And then just to see the solemnity, but also mixed with the humor of the Catholic Church, a very fun...
I'm still very fond of it.
I had a wonderful experience in that church.
But then, at that exact same time, I acquired my first telescope.
And I became infatuated with the night sky and learning about astronomy.
And one of the first people to ever use a telescope, in fact, the first person to ever use a telescope, was Galileo Galilei in the first part of the 1600s.
And he was also a devoutly religious person, and he was obviously under the influence of the Catholic Church in Northern Italy.
And he turned this tiny little spectacle device made from two flimsy glass lenses and a little tube made of lead-covered cardboard, and he turned it to the sky.
And he observed things that I observed at the exact same moment with the exact same size telescope at age 12.
And it sort of kindled this fire within me to want to learn more about Galileo.
And of course, the history books about Galileo are replete with discussions of him being tortured for science and heresy and all sorts of things.
I would later learn that was nothing of the, you know, nothing, no truth to that actual assertion.
But in this case, I wanted to be like him.
And so I felt like at that time, if he had been persecuted for science and he had still not been pardoned, you know, this is the mid 80s, when I was encountering astronomy for the first time, I wanted no part of the Catholic Church.
So, I became an atheist, like many people do in their late teens and college, a very fashionable to become an atheist.
And so, I did.
And I ended up, you know, basically coming back to Judaism only as a result of September 11th, actually, when I started to realize, well, you know, Jews and Israel seems to have this big impact on the world in some way or another.
And I knew far more about Christianity and even had friends from other faiths.
And atheism certainly in the classic arguments against God, etc., etc.
And it was really only after that and the desire to want to start a family and to be part of this chain stretching back in history that I realized I knew almost nothing about Judaism, the faith that I'd been born into.
And so I decided at that point to learn more about Judaism, and that's how I came to become back to, you know, as a practicing Jew.
Not full Jew, as you say, you do Jew very well, but I practice and I'm committed to the faith now and it's incredibly satisfying.
It adds a complete different dimension than I ever would have had otherwise.
When you were returning to religion, was it about a sort of personal experience with religion or was it more about intellectual arguments on behalf of God and against sort of atheistic arguments that drew you back to religion?
I think it was a little of each.
I mean, I felt like there was a vast, I'd been gifted a vast reservoir of treasures that I had basically overlooked, and the people in my family and people that had come beforehand.
And I felt an almost obligation, as I realized later that scientists do as well.
I mean, scientists, I learned interesting in Russian, and I hope there's no Russian listeners out there, Russian bots, but the word scientist in Russian means someone who was taught.
I mean, as a person who was taught, which made me think, well, then we have an obligation to be good students, but also to be teachers.
And I felt like all this chain of history, of culture, of ethnicity, that I'd just been throwing away and to my detriment.
And I knew nothing about it.
And it made me feel, you know, kind of intellectually weak.
And I didn't like that feeling.
It was uncomfortable.
It's like when you encounter a new problem and you want to solve it.
And there's so much depth to the benefits of a religious life.
I don't care if people believe or not, but the benefits are clear.
And everybody will admit that.
That there's been proven time and again.
And I think I was missing out on that.
And it was just a rational decision to sort of come to it.
And throughout the last 20 years of my life almost, this has been a constant quest that parallels the deep mystery that I feel when I study things astronomically and scientifically, to want to understand more about whether or not God exists.
Because actually, I consider myself a practicing agnostic, like a devout agnostic, in that as a scientist, we can't prove something, right?
Our job is to disprove things.
In this case, I want to practice, though.
So what's the difference between someone who calls himself or herself an agnostic?
You know, she or he still doesn't go to the same, you know, church that Sam Harris doesn't go to.
So how do you distinguish an agnostic from an atheist, a real atheist?
Or now they've rebranded themselves, you know, humanist or naturalist or whatever.
And I think that's practicing.
That's actually doing something, committing to a practice.
And that's what I've done for myself and my family.
So in a second I'm going to ask you about the bias against religion, particularly in the sciences, the fact that the vast overwhelming number of people who are practicing sciences consider themselves to be atheists or maybe agnostics if they decide to be generous with their language that day.
First, I've got some bad news for you.
You are going to die.
I'm sorry to break it to you that way, but we all are.
So I guess that's good news.
We'll all be together in death.
But the bad news is we're still going to die.
And that means we all need life insurance.
September is National Life Insurance Awareness Month.
I bet you didn't know that.
In fact, most people aren't aware they need life insurance at all.
And then they die and they realize, well, I probably shouldn't, or maybe they don't realize anything, but their family realizes that they needed life insurance.
This is why 40% of Americans don't have life insurance.
But Getting life insurance doesn't need to be difficult or expensive or even depressing.
Right now, prices are the lowest they have been in 20 years.
PolicyGenius has made it easier than ever to get covered.
PolicyGenius is the easy way to shop for life insurance online.
In minutes, you can compare quotes from top insurers and find your best price.
Once you apply, the PolicyGenius team will handle all the paperwork and the red tape.
And PolicyGenius doesn't just do life insurance.
They can also help you find the right home insurance, auto insurance, disability insurance, Again, you need life insurance to be a responsible adult and make sure that your family is taken care of.
So, if you need life insurance but you just haven't gotten around to it, National Life Insurance Awareness Month is as good a time as any to get started.
Go to policygenius.com, get quotes, apply in minutes.
You can do the whole thing on your phone right this very instant.
PolicyGenius, the easy way to compare and buy life insurance.
Alrighty, so polls tend to show that scientists, you may be the only religious believer in your field, I guess, is the question.
You look at the polls of scientists, whether you're looking at the field of physics or if you're looking in the medical field, scientists are overwhelmingly atheistic in nature.
Why do you think that is?
Why is there this apparent massive gap between the practice of science and belief in religion?
I think that, you know, many scientists fall back on this trope that, you know, I'd rather have questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned.
As if, you know, as you know, the word Israel in Hebrew means someone who fights with God or a people that argues with God.
In other words, we're trying to continually, and we are being tested in some ways, and it is difficult, right?
I mean, the question of theodicy, you've gone over that many times.
But in particular, I think scientists have a natural anti-authoritarianism that they don't like to be told what to do.
I think that they Oftentimes, the biggest atheists that I know have sort of a very simplistic understanding of religion, and so it's very easy to prop up a straw man, straw woman, as we would say, and then tear it down, burn it up, because in reality, that's just another form of, instead of anti-authority bias, it's a form of confirmation bias.
This is stupid, this is a fairy tale, this is, you know, and here's this thing where, you know, the sun stood still, that's total nonsense, therefore let's throw out everything, okay?
They're left with a very, you know, many of these people, you know, Jewish scholars that become scientists, and I'm not the only one.
Many people, very few people, I think, are practicing maybe to a level that, you know, someone like me might practice, although there are some, but they have an affinity for it.
And it may be cultural, it may be ethnic, etc.
But, you know, I think they're left from their bar mitzvah or confirmation in a Christian case, you know, with that level of understanding.
And I always say, like, would you take a 13-year-old's refutation of Einstein's theory of general relativity?
Get out of here, you little guy!
You would never accept that, and yet you're so willing to accept the refutation of thousands of years of history and whatever from a 13-year-old, i.e.
you at age 13 when you had your bar mitzvah and threw off everything after the party was over, right?
So, you know, as I say, I always tell my friends, I don't care if you believe in God.
I don't care if you don't believe in God, you know, that can oscillate and be there.
But I care if you think about it or not, if you take it seriously.
Because if you don't, I think, you know, it's fundamentally impossible to prove or disprove the existence of God, right?
So that means, you know, and some people say, well like, who is a man to say that he or she believes in God?
It's a lot of chutzpah, right?
I think it's important to wrestle and to fight.
And you'd think that scientists, who are the foremost advocates of intellectual jousting and sparring, that they would be willing to do this.
But unfortunately, I think that they don't.
I think it's because it comes along with a cacomitant system of rules and practices that, if they were to believe, would be incumbent upon them.
And they find that distasteful.
I don't blame them.
It's not easy.
When you talk about confirmation bias, I wonder your opinion on sort of the confirmation bias that surrounds the question of science and God.
So on the one side, you have folks like Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins who suggest that science has conclusively disproved the existence of God, that science absolutely cuts against the existence of a greater being with a plan for the universe.
And then on the other side you have folks like Stephen Meyer who say, no, no, no, when you look at the science what you see is God's signature in the cell and DNA.
You see sort of clues that God has left behind as to the organization of nature in a particular way that speaks of an intelligence beyond mere evolution, for example.
Do you think that science cuts in favor or against God, or do you think that science really doesn't have much to say on the issue?
I think the latter and I view myself as having a unique role in that I can sort of troll the atheists and I can troll the theists in the sense of I think if you believe in God, if you claim to be a believer, there may be no closer window into the mind of God than to study science.
It's the most primitive distilled facts about nature that may reveal in the case of some people who believe in things like intelligent design, etc.
that it may reveal a window into God and on the other hand, And if you're so simplistic that you would reject or claim that the Bible, the Old Testament, however you want to say it, that that was a science book.
And therefore, you can refute it.
I always like to use this analogy.
I looked up in your sports fans.
You'll appreciate this.
I looked up the top 25 most famous NBA stars.
And number one is Amari Stoudemire.
So he's a convert, I think, to Judaism.
But nevertheless, much appreciated.
And number 25, and there's like Dolph Shays, and there's some wonderful NBA players on this list.
And then you get to the bottom and there's a picture and it's just an image not found.
Like there aren't that many great Jewish basketball stars just in history.
And I said, well, how many total NBA stars have there been in total?
There's about 1,000, or about 25,000.
So that means that's about one in every 1,000 players was a Jewish player.
Now, imagine you pick up a book and it says the history of the NBA, and it's 1,000 pages long, and one page is about all the non-Jews and so forth, and the rest is all about Jews and the NBA.
You'd say, this is not really, like, I shouldn't judge this book by its cover.
And the Torah, as you know, probably the Old Testament, has about 35,000 total verses in it.
And 35,000, if I'm generous, would have to do something with creation, evolution, maybe, if you're really willing to stretch that same ratio.
35,000 out of 35,000.
And so, it's obviously not meant to be read as a science book.
And this is, you know, kind of, I would say I would adopt the non-overlapping magisteria argument of Stephen Jay Gould, that these are two different things.
Torah or Bible or whatever means wisdom.
Science in Greek means knowledge.
And so they're very different things.
You know, Wikipedia has a lot of knowledge.
It doesn't have any wisdom.
Well, in your book, Losing the Nobel Prize, you talk at length about the history of cosmology, which is, of course, your field of study.
Why do you think it's important to learn about that?
Does that shed light on anything beyond the physical founding of the universe?
Or does that have something to speak to, something deeper?
I always wanted to study the biggest possible things.
You know, I wanted to be a philosopher at one point, but the job market was too rich.
You know, there were too many options for me.
And so I decided I would be an astronomer.
And I think in astronomy, I gravitated, no pun intended, to the most fundamental question.
How did the universe come to be?
Are there other universes?
What existed before on the Tuesday before the Big Bang?
These kinds of questions just fascinate me and still...
And always have.
And I think, you know, cosmology starts in the only story in the history of all stories to not begin in media race, in the beginning, right?
In the middle.
Every other story begins in the middle.
Here, in cosmology, perhaps we begin with the very beginning.
So I think, for that reason, it captivates the mind.
Our origin stories, our quest to understand how did we get to this point where we are now.
I always say, like, I don't know the names of my great-great-great-great-grandfather, you know, or whatever, or my great-great-great-great-grandfather.
Well, let's see.
Any day I don't have to actually broadcast.
But aside from that, calendar year?
I actually, like my father, I've become fond of Yom Kippur.
you, what is the most, you know, what's your most favorite day of the year, you know, on the calendar every year for you personally?
Well, let's see.
Any day I don't have to actually broadcast.
But aside from that, calendar year, I actually, like my father, I've become fond of Yom Kippur.
I like the day where you sort of get to unburden yourself to God and then you finish it and you're clean.
Okay.
Thank you for ruining this analogy.
But most people will say birthday or anniversary or something.
So that's the beginning.
That's when they began.
That's the origin of who they are, you know, just in his existence.
And I think people want to know that about the universe.
I think it captivates the mind in a way that, you know, studying very important things like electromagnetism or whatever, crucially important to physics, but, you know, it doesn't have that origin story gravitas to it.
And I think that's what fascinates people about it.
So in a second, I want to ask you to tell a little bit of that story for people who are not familiar with sort of the development of cosmology as a field, because it is a very new field, actually.
I'm going to ask you about that in just one second.
First, the fact is that we are watching right now as central banks around the globe are manipulating currencies.
Last week, China devalued its currency and markets proceeded to tank.
Precisely as you would expect.
One consequence was that Bitcoin prices actually rose.
Well, it's time to seriously consider including some crypto in your portfolio.
Crypto is basically just online gold.
All it is, is it's a resource that is limited and finite in amount.
Blockchain makes sure that they are not randomly producing more crypto to devalue the currency and it's not going to be subject to the vicissitudes of centralized governments.
The best place to trade crypto is eToro.
eToro is smart crypto trading made easy.
eToro's social trading platform has over 11 million active traders and facilitates over $1 trillion in trading volume per year globally.
You can access the world's best cryptocurrencies.
They've got 15 different coins available.
They've got low and transparent fees.
You can try it before you trade with a virtual portfolio with $100,000 budgets.
You can try it, see how you do.
Never miss a trading trend with charts and pricing alerts as well.
Sign up today at etoro.com slash Shapiro.
That's E-T-O-R-O dot com slash Shapiro.
Etoro.com slash Shapiro.
Go check them out.
Give them a try.
Etoro.com slash Shapiro.
All right, so I don't mean to make you go through your entire undergrad course in cosmology over at University of San Diego, but I do want to ask you for sort of the nutshell synopsis of how human understanding of cosmology has changed.
Because for most of human history, it seems, or most of written history, There is a binary view, which was either that the universe was created the way it says in the Bible, or the Aristotelian view, which is the universe always was there, and it was there just the way that it always been there.
Obviously, scientists shed a lot of light on the question of the origins of the universe.
So where do we currently stand?
So, we know now that the universe is approximately 5,880 million years old.
We know with exquisite precision that the universe is actually, we understand with 1% uncertainty, the universe is 13,799,000,000 years old.
And the way that we came to know that is through the work of many of my colleagues in the field of experimental cosmology.
So, I should distinguish between theoretical cosmology, which is what Stephen Hawking does and other people did.
And then those of us who build telescopes that observe things.
Sometimes we set out to measure things in particular.
Sometimes we're surprised by serendipitous findings that enter into our telescope.
And I should say astronomy in some sense, and this is biased in some ways, but is the heart of science.
Because we don't get to do an experiment like my biology friends.
For all I know they work on frogs all day and they can take a frog and they can put some chemical on it or do some surgery.
I have no idea what they do.
I don't want to know.
I hope the dean stays out of there.
But, you know, they can do an experiment.
They can have a control, they can have a variable, they can assess the effects of their hypothesis, you know, on the control, on the variable.
In cosmology, we have to wait.
In astronomy, we have to wait for data or for things to come into our telescopes.
Traveling at a finite speed, which is about 186,000 miles per second, quite fast, but still slow when you compare it to the age of the universe and how many seconds are in the age of the universe.
And so we are fortunate that we have a time machine at our disposal, which is a telescope, because when I'm looking at you, I'm seeing the way that you look, not instantaneously now, but light travels about one foot per nanosecond.
So I'm actually seeing you, you look very young, but you're actually two nanoseconds younger as I see you, right?
Because we're two feet away.
And I think it's amazing to think about that when you look when there's nothing in the way.
No band, no lights, nothing else.
You're looking back to the very beginning of when light itself was produced.
That's called the cosmic microwave background radiation.
From studying that light, we've come to know the age and some things about the composition of the universe.
But many, many mysteries await.
For example, we don't know exactly what kicked the Big Bang off.
So the Big Bang is Is the colloquial term, it's actually a pejorative coined by Fred Hoyle, which has an unseemly meaning in UK English for reasons I won't get into, but he was a proponent of the steady state model.
So you alluded to the steady state essentially, which is what Aristotle believed in an eternal universe.
Fred Hoyle believed in a version of an eternal universe that was cycling throughout time, and we won't get into too many details about that.
But those were kind of the competing views and we really didn't have evidence were either one being correct or not.
Until 1929 when Hubble and others, not far from here, discovered the universe is changing.
It can't be static.
It can't be eternal in its current state.
It didn't stop people from coming up with other ideas on how it could possibly be infinitely old but evolving in time.
So that took the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation by Penzias and Wilson in 1965.
So this is thermal heat left over from the Big Bang, the fusion of the elements hydrogen and helium, a little bit of lithium, which is more important for some people than others.
But that formation of the elements is what led to eventually stars being there.
Stars produce supernovae eventually, which produces planets, and then podcasts and people a long time later.
One of the things that you talk about in losing the Nobel Prize is the resistance to this idea that there was an origin to the universe.
And specifically that a lot of that was based in an anti-religious sentiment, which is this looks a lot like the very beginning of the Bible.
And that scares a lot of scientists.
Yeah.
So back then in the 1950s and so forth when Fred Hoyle, who was an amazing astronomer, he won basically the runner-up prize to the Nobel Prize, Crayford Prize.
He ended up saying that the reason that scientists are so adamant about the Big Bang is because they're obsessed with Genesis 1-1.
Now, can you imagine, you know, Lawrence Krauss or somebody, you know, famous, prominent, like, oh, I'm obsessed.
I have to prove that Genesis 1-1.
I mean, it's absurd.
And as you pointed out earlier, most scientists are atheists.
I mean, the majority of the National Academy of Sciences, the most prestigious organization on Earth, are declared atheists.
Or, you know, 20% are agnostic or don't know and 10% believe, say, atheists.
And so it's interesting how much we've evolved just since the 1950s.
And then to actually have that brought into focus and that people now accept without a doubt that there was a beginning of what we call the observable universe.
That does not mean that we've witnessed time equals zero.
And that's where things get really interesting because we don't have a theory that describes how properties of matter of space and time itself.
I mean, have you ever thought, let's say time began.
What causes something to begin when there's no something to begin with to begin with, right?
So how did time change from nothing into something?
And these are questions that have perfectly good answers, potentially, but we don't have the data.
So my job is to collect that data, or perhaps refute these models by collecting data that is objectionable under those hypotheses.
So in this particular context, obviously, a lot of religious believers say, well, got a good answer for what kicked off time.
But we have this whole religious literature that's built around the idea that there was a thing that kicked off time and that thing was God.
This is what we call God in the in the Thomistic model.
But the scientists have been promoting A bunch of different theories as to why the universe was created the way that it was, why it exists in the way that it does.
And it seems like a lot of this is a response to some of the arguments, yes, that some religious believers have made about the fine-tuning of the universe, the idea that a certain number of things had to go exactly right for us to be here at this time.
And so you hear arguments made on a fairly routine basis about how, well, you know, that's just how randomness works.
We're just the lucky ones.
And religious believers argue back, well, but why are we the lucky ones?
That's a pretty convenient argument, that we happen to be the lucky ones.
Why wouldn't we have been one of the non-lucky ones, exactly?
So how do you circle that square?
I mean, how do you come down on that particular debate?
I mean, I think for me, it's so much fun to think about these things.
So nowadays, you know, you're alluding to the anthropic principle, which I'll describe in a minute, and the multiverse.
It's funny, in scientific circles, with my scientist friends, I can't say multiverse without getting into a fight.
You know, you say multiverse and they're like, we're going to take sides.
And some people say, that's not even science.
Or they'll say, that's, you know, that's pure nonsense.
Or they'll say, this is the best answer that scientists have.
And, you know, the, the, the people out there when they're not, you know, comparing me to like Chen Eager or whatever, they'll say, this guy believes that, that, you know, that they, you know, the hypothesis, which scientists just use as a working tool and they'll reject it.
I mean, they have much more faith in kind of the dispassionate scientists, which has led to this, to this real canard almost and overused stereotype that scientists are just these dispassionate people that work have no feelings, have no objective, have no motive, no biases.
And in the book, I count many different biases, prejudices that scientists, including me, are afflicted by.
And I think it's important to realize that that when you have these discussions, when they turn heated, and I think it's interesting.
I never hear from the religious.
I hear crazy things from religious people, you know, that are just non-scientific, to bolster their own hypothesis.
They're perfectly willing to have confirmation bias sometimes, too.
But in the case of the scientists, I think they're, again, this is touching back on some deep thing within them, a sensitive nerve that, you know, if there was something true about religion, then I have all these obligations.
And I have enough to do, you know, at the faculty club already.
As I said, it's the hardest three-hour-a-week job in the world.
But I think it's very interesting to think about these questions of what generated this new pursuit in science.
Was it a reaction to these religious explanations?
So Robert Jastrow worked at Goddard Space Center and he wrote a book called God and the Astronomers.
Now he was a declared agnostic.
And he said, upon the discovery of this cosmic background radiation that I studied through telescopes like BICEP and the Simons Observatory, that people came, scientists who were secular, climbed to the top of the mountain and found a band of theologians rejoicing up there.
On the other hand, when the Big Bang was first proposed by a Belgian priest named Lemaitre, He implicitly told the Pope, do not use this as evidence for the creation narrative of Genesis 1-1.
And he was intellectually honest about that, that this is not necessarily, should not be used.
Again, these are non-overlapping magisteria in Stephen Jay Gould's language.
These are not, these are two different things.
I mean, to think about, you know, reading the Bible as a science book is as absurd as reading a brief history of time and thinking, oh, that's how I'm going to raise my children, or that's my obligations as a moral ethical being.
So I think I think these controversies, to me, are so much fun, because these are two puzzles, and we may go to our graves and not answer these questions, but to not think about them, I think it leaves a life of slight impoverishment that my colleagues, unfortunately, many of them, many of them do, love to think about and love to talk about it, though they stay in the closet about it.
So what do you make of some of the theories that have been promoted as alternatives to religious theory?
The multiverse theory, for example, or the theory that we are all living in some sort of giant computer simulation.
It seems to me that these are utterly unprovable.
What's the evidence, if any, for these?
Well, it's so fascinating to me is that when you talk about, you know, is something science, does it follow the centuries-old scientific method, which actually traces back to my intellectual hero Galileo, where you have a hypothesis, you test it, use data, you confirm that, or refute it.
And most of the time we're trying to refute it.
Now, Galileo made some huge whoppers.
I mean, he believed that, you know, certain crazy things about the universe that we now know are false.
And it's too bad, because he could have had a good career.
Same with Einstein.
Einstein had huge whoppers, blunders, and he admitted them, but he never stopped the pursuit of this.
And I think the multiverse is kind of, you know, it fits into this camp, the so-called Copernican debates that scientists have been having since Galileo and Copernicus, back in the 15th and 16th and 17th centuries, where people were thinking about, was the solar system, was the Earth in some central place in the universe?
Were we the center of the solar system?
So, Copernicus conjectured, no, Galileo provided evidence.
Actually, not that we were not the center of the solar system, but that there were other centers of the solar system that could equally claim to be as important as the Earth.
So it was important.
He didn't prove a hypothesis.
He refuted another hypothesis.
That's what we do as experimentalists, and I'm exactly 100% comparing myself to Galileo, but it's wonderful to be in this tradition where your job is kind of to exterminate theories and get rid of them.
I wonder sometimes if the multiverse is not destined to the ash heap of history simply because it may be impossible to either prove it right or prove it wrong.
And sometimes I feel like we rely too much on what Karl Popper called this falsification dictum, that you have to be able to prove a theory wrong.
And he brought that up in the context of astrology and Freudianism and other psychoanalysis tools in the 1930s.
And so he's a famous logician, philosopher.
He said, something is not scientific if it's so flexible it can accommodate any particular piece of data that comes in.
So astrology.
Today will be a lousy day for you, Ben, because you have to record a podcast.
That happens a lot, apparently.
Yom Kippur only comes once a year.
So he said that things have to be Falsifiable.
You have to be able to prove them wrong.
But I like to point out, one of the things that was also a bugaboo for him was Marxism.
He thought Marxist thought was also non-scientific, dialectic materialism, etc, etc.
And that could never be falsified or proven because you couldn't have the social theory and actually create enough ensemble universes where you try out collectivism, Marxism, whatever.
And so I always point out it's very interesting because there's more socialist countries, more Marxist dictatorships on Earth now than in the time when actually Popper was writing these things.
And, you know, if you look at your L.A.
Times, you'll find an astrology column on the back.
So more people believe in these things.
So in some sense, Popper himself was falsified.
So I think the question of what is scientific is a fascinating question.
I don't think there is a great definition for it.
However, when you conjecture unseeable unencounterable things that predict no data.
And you say they're a consequence of a greater theory called inflation.
And if A, then B, if we get inflation, then we get the multiverse, we can also construct an infinite number of universes where inflation took place, but there is no multiverse.
So the question of how that couples into a scientist's desire to want to explain the existence of life, conscious sentient life on Earth, is a very interesting one because that requires in the multiverse an infinite panoply perhaps of universes, ours just being one infinitesimally small pinprick.
And I think, you know, it's a fascinating question.
We should absolutely research it.
But when people have come out against it, they get hammered, you know, by actually in the press and the scientific journals.
I know you subscribe to them all.
But, you know, you have these responsa prudentia, you know, people going back and forth, arguing with each other about how dare you say this is not scientific and how dare you believe in something fanciful like the multiverse.
I think there's equal and that's what makes it so delightful, so delicious to be a scientist, to be able to like, this is what I get paid to do.
Not much.
For those of us who are not in the scientific field, we look at physicists and we think that you are sitting in a room all day and just drawing equations on boards and then occasionally you look at a telescope and stuff happens.
So what exactly is a day like in the life of somebody who actually practices Yeah, so it is quite wonderful.
I mean, most of what I do, because I have this enterprise, building telescopes costs a lot of money.
We take them all over the world, literally the bottom of the world, Antarctica, the top of the Andes Mountains in Chile, and that takes a lot of money.
It takes a lot of time and money, and then design the apparatus, the instrument, the telescopes.
I thought as an astronomer I'd spend a lot more of my time on telescopes than telecons, and I spent a lot of time on the phone.
Dealing with universities.
And that's one of the greatest parts about being a scientist.
As I said, it means someone who is taught.
And I get to work with people literally all around the world.
On all seven continents, 257 people work on the Simons Observatory, my current big project in the Atacama Desert of Chile.
So a lot of it is logistics.
You're bringing concrete and you're bringing diesel fuel.
And I work with these brilliant people that know far more than I do about almost everything.
And I get to learn from them.
And I sometimes come up with new and original ideas.
And that's extremely satisfying.
But, you know, if someone had told me when I was a kid that you could get paid to be an astronomer, I would say, like, can I get paid to be an ice cream taster?
Like, I didn't think of it as, you know, can I be a wizard and get gainful employment?
You know, it seems so fanciful that no one would employ me to do such a thing.
But on a daily basis, it's, you know, it's quite mundane.
It's actually not, you know, stroking my non-existent beard.
But it's thinking about new ways to prove things that possibly could exist that prove that they don't exist.
And through technological means, not just through pure speculation.
That's a theoretical cosmologist moral role, traditional role.
But actually thinking about ways to prove that wrong.
And it's hard.
It's hard to prove, you know, ideas wrong because, as I said, it takes so long for information and data to get into our telescopes.
It's taken billions of years.
And it takes, you know, many dozens of years in some cases to build a telescope, get the team assembled, get all the logistics like mounting a campaign or an invasion.
And except we're fighting against this foe that has an infinite amount of resources, Mother Nature.
So, we've had on this program a bunch of people who kind of reside in the scientific community and are in the scientific materialist world, people like Michael Shermer or people like Sam Harris.
And, you know, they're a lot of fun to talk to.
One of the points that they seem to make, and a point that I've always fought, is the idea that you can connect is with ought.
So Sam Harris constantly suggests that you can derive a system of meaning and morality from the bare facts of the universe.
And you get the same thing from Michael Shermer, that you can find meaning in staring at the night sky.
He has a book about our heavens on earth and his basic theory is that true heaven is experiencing joy with your family or looking up at the night sky and seeing stars and all this.
And I've always thought That this is a mistake, that you're reading a physics textbook and if you can find a higher meaning there, I mean, good for you, but it seems like that is more you projecting a need for meaning onto a physics textbook than it is finding actual meaning in a physics textbook.
After all, a physics textbook presumably is just a series of rules and laws as to how the universe operates, not anything with regard to how you should operate within that universe.
So it's always interesting to me how people have conflated the Copernican conjecture that we're not the center of the universe, let's just use that as a colloquialism, for somehow demoting humanity and making us less special.
And this continues to this very day.
So the multiverse is basically saying we're a cosmic accident, and then within the space of our observable universe, which we have access to with data, we get meteorites from, we're basically, you know, to quote Lawrence Krauss, you know, we're cosmic pollution.
We either have zero worth, where we're just like a virus on Earth or a virus in the heavens, so to speak, or we have, you know, this communability with the planet Jupiter and the methane and we'll feel like we're one with the methane or whatever.
And one of my friends, a very close friend who blurred my book, Sean Carroll, a physicist at Caltech, he wrote a book called The Big Picture.
in which he's proposing a theory called, or a model of philosophy called poetic naturalism.
It's humanism in the form.
At the end, he comes up with, you know, essentially a version of, you know, the categorical imperative, you know, except he phrases it in terms of Bill and Ted's excellent, you know, excellent adventure, be excellent to each other.
You know, it's this amazing, brilliant scientist who's quoting Bill and Ted.
It's kind of cute.
Then he comes up with the Ten Commandments.
And I'm like, well, you know, we have the Ten Commandments, you know.
Like, I think if you are willing to psychologically suspend the difficulties that you might have with maybe feelings of obligation, if I do believe in now I have to go to church, you know, I don't want to do that.
But if you say, look, is there wisdom here?
Is there something important here?
First of all, a lot of physicists disdain philosophy and they feel like this is not important.
It hasn't produced anything useful in a scientific sense.
Maybe you could argue they're correct.
I happen to love philosophy.
I think it's brilliant and it's a wonderful thing to study.
But I think trying to come up with those meanings I think either devolves to deism, you know, like we're Gaia and the moons of Jupiter are just as valuable as us, etc.
Or it'll be, yeah, it'll be kind of this kind of attempt to reconstruct the, you know, the flower buds from the stem.
And I think, you know, from what I've read of Pinker, and I know Michael very well, you know, these are noble attempts, but it sort of, in my mind, just reinforces, like, the actual practicing agnostic aspect.
Like, why not practice?
I mean, I talk about in the book, my desire in the book was a quest to As a scientist, we can't prove the Torah's true, the Bible's true, the Old Testament's true, but we could maybe disprove it.
And I found that, startlingly, I could find meaning in some of the passages that I thought I would falsify.
You know, honor your mother and your father.
Where do you get that from?
I mean, why is that important?
Like, does it even make sense?
And I think it does.
You know, what was interesting to me in reading that commandment, as you know, but maybe listeners might not know, is that there's a reward promised for honoring your mother and father.
And that's one of only two commandments that has a reward.
So I was like, this gives me an opportunity to prove the Bible wrong.
This is what I've been looking for.
Now I don't have to go, you know, spend my Saturdays, you know, and fast on Yom Kippur and Christmas.
No, I don't do that.
But, realizing that the reward was lengthening my days on earth, and taking care of people that matter most to me, and my parents in this sense, the ones who created me, they're responsible for my own personal origin.
I found meaning in that, and that felt beautiful to me.
Now, that's not proof that God exists, but you know, why reinvent the wheel?
There's only so much time that we have on earth, and those guys are brilliant, and you know, props to them for confronting these ideas, but they leave me kind of feeling it's bland.
I mean, that is sort of my take as well.
I do get the feeling, and I made this argument both to Michael and to Sam, that they are basically backfilling traditional morality that they grew up on, because they grew up in a society that values exactly these morals, with a post-facto justification that they've created for themselves and that they've created for the universe.
And shockingly, it comes to exactly the same conclusions that I would come to as a religious person, except they did so on the basis of a reason that is not, in fact, backed by scientific materialism in the first place.
That is the part that I've always found most puzzling, is that Michael, who places such stock in evolutionary biology, and I, of course, I'm a believer in evolution, and Sam, who does the same thing.
How do you derive from that a set of moral rules rooted in reason, when reason itself as a concept is not supportable by evolutionary biology?
Evolutionary biology suggests that you have evolved in order to best adapt to your environment, but that does not suggest anything about the fundamental truth or falsity of an assertion that your mind makes.
It just speaks to the efficacy of an assertion that your mind makes.
Well, if that's the case, how can you say that anything is moral or immoral?
It's not.
It's either adaptive or it's non-adaptive, right?
That's the language that should be used.
And yet there's this easy switch into, well, no, there's reason, and reason suggests that there is a good and that there is a bad and that we are not complete moral relativists.
It seems to me that there is such a struggle at work in a lot of the scientific community to come up with systems of living specifically to avoid Right.
having to say, well, maybe there's a God.
And it's like, that seems like a heavy lift.
Why don't you just say, okay, maybe there's a God.
I don't know.
You don't know.
Right.
But based on that, we can derive exactly the same.
And so human societies have for millennia, derived exactly the same morality that I have.
The world didn't begin spinning, in other words, when I was born.
Exactly.
Yeah, and I feel like that too.
I mean, I discuss Pascal's Wager, you know, in the book, which is this assertion that you could live in accordance with a doctrine, and it could be Christian, it could be Judeo-Christian, it could be Muslim, whatever you want.
And Sam, by the way, does, as far as I know, I subscribe to his app, you know, he's a Buddhist, and in that there are certain psychological things that he must wrestle with, and I don't understand exactly how he deals with that.
It is a religion.
There is a founding father of that religion.
There's a culture thousands of years old that's beautiful.
But to say that there's nothing religious about that, there's no deity about that.
Now, on the other hand, I do feel like we give sometimes the ultra-religious, and I'm not putting you in this camp, but we give too much of a pass to certain religious types because, for example, like once I heard one of my friends who's actually a rabbi and he said, you know, he saw a rainbow and he said, oh, you know, one of his kids, I said, who made that rainbow?
Or where did the rainbow come from?
He said, God.
And I felt that was, you know, I didn't say child to be here, but I said, look, look, I'd rather, and this is what I tell my kids, and that kids ask me where the rainbow come from.
I say it's from certain refraction properties of water that produce this beautiful spectrum that we interpret in our eyes.
And where did that come from?
Water molecules are made of hydrogen and oxygen.
Where did they come from?
Well, water molecules are protons and neutrons.
And where did they come from?
And you keep going until you get to a point, I can say, I don't know.
Where did that come from?
What the heck is wrong with that?
I think that that stumping somebody and stopping somebody and saying, I'm going to stop your investigation here and say everything was done by God.
I think that that is inherently, you know, it's depriving your children of a possibly beautiful, you know, path that they may go down to.
And you shouldn't fear it.
You shouldn't fear, oh, well, the kids are not going to learn about science.
Some schools teach, you know, in religious schools and different faiths, you know, they will teach things.
I don't want taught in certainly in the public schools, you know, what they do in their private school is fine.
But, you know, for me, I think it's depriving your child of something that could be beautiful in their case.
And I think, why would you want to do that?
Just the same way I say, like, stopping and saying, well, let's throw this out.
Because I think, you know, practicing a religious life, as we already talked about, it's disgust, ad nauseam, and even people like Michael Shermer will admit.
And there's actually an atheist church, you know, which is called the Sunday Assembly, and I've spoken at many times.
There's one here in LA, San Diego, and it's wonderful.
And they get together, you know, they sing hymns, but the hymns are, you know, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and they read, you know, Portnoy's Complaint passage.
And then they have speakers like me, and I'll go and I'll talk about the multiverse, I'll talk about God, and they're totally open to it.
Why do they do that?
They do service projects, you know, they give charity.
It's beautiful.
They're replicating a system that they've seen the wisdom in, and there's nothing wrong with that.
And you're not going to go up, even if you go up and you find out, like, actually Buddha was true, you know, there is no God in Yahweh in our tradition.
The way that you live your life, a good God is not going to say, how could you Possibly not eat pork, you know?
It's just not gonna happen.
So, yeah, I agree with you.
I mean, I definitely agree with the philosophy that you should teach your kids as much science as you possibly can, specifically because not only, I think, are you developing their brains and making their lives more rich, but I think, at the same time, you are setting your kids up for a tremendous fall if your first appeal is always to God.
Because the first time they go to college, they're like, no, actually, that rainbow was, in fact, refracting off water molecules.
They go, well, but I thought that was God.
That seems a little bit simplistic now.
Teaching children religion as a fairy tale is what leads to them being convinced that religion is in fact a fairy tale by people who have never had experience with religion beyond their 13-year-old selves.
It's why I've yet to encounter a serious religious scholar who will read The New Atheist and say, ah, I find this incredibly convincing.
But I find a lot of people who have not spent a ton of time with religion or who maybe went to Sunday school as kids who will read that stuff and they'll say, no, that's actually kind of convincing.
In other words, if you teach your kids a simplistic view of religion, then a critique of that simplistic view will be incredibly effective.
If you teach your kids a more complex view of religion and meaning, then it's a lot harder to debunk that with simplistic appeals to a sort of straw man of what religion amounts to.
Yeah.
I think you have to include the lessons with the love and in this case, taking, you know, cherry picking things, you know, trying to prove the Bible, trying to use it as a science.
I think that's all misguided.
But then saying, because it's not a science book, I can't use it for anything.
Again, I remember hearing once, when I started writing a book, it's better to have one reader 100 years from now than 100 readers one year from now.
Luckily, I've got 101 readers, so I've got all my bases covered.
But when you look at the Torah, you look at the Bible, Old Testament, That's thousands of years old, and it's the bestseller, right?
It's consistently, you know, outranking the right side of history.
So why does it speak eternal values back then, thousands of years ago, and today, and presumably into the future?
I would be depressed if, well, let me just say, I hope people read this hundreds of years from now, but I doubt they're going to, right?
Because what is science?
Science is the process of self-correcting, proving things wrong, getting rid of old things that didn't work, and reducing the chaff, and what's left is this kernel of beautiful truth.
And I think that is a beautiful quest to be on.
But to neglect the wisdom and the traditions, whatever your faith is, or if you have no faith, that's the thing.
People think that they have to believe, and that's not the way it started for me.
I didn't start off believing in God, you know, September 11th, now I'm going to believe in God.
It's been a process.
And I think until we come to a point where you can study it, and you can confront it, and take it seriously, I think you're missing out on some of the richness that you would miss out on if you taught your kids, likewise, that God made all the rainbows, as we said before.
Okay, so I now want to ask you about the other topic that you cover at length in losing the Nobel Prize, which is the handling of science, how science is actually done.
So, those of us who are sort of lay people, we look at the scientific community, we think, Who have come up with a clear and concise system for crafting the best, most rigorous methods.
And it's not a quest for glory.
It's not a quest for self-aggrandizement.
It's a quest merely for truth.
In this book, you speak in I will not say sterling terms about the Nobel Prize, which is seen as sort of obviously by lay people and scientists alike as sort of the gold standard for science.
You talk about how you think this is sort of perverted, what science was supposed to be in the scientific quest itself.
And you, of course, were involved in the attempt to win a Nobel Prize.
You came very close to being part of a team that won the Nobel Prize.
Maybe you can tell that story and then explain why you are so against the Nobel Prize.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So a lot of people look at me and say, well, you know, you came close to winning a Nobel Prize.
You didn't win it.
And so now you got sour grapes.
And I would say, look, you want to see if I'm sincere, get them to offer me the Nobel Prize.
If I don't turn it down, I'm a hypocrite.
And one critic on a blog wrote, you know, I disagree with his premise that we need to get rid of the Nobel Prize, but he's such a good writer he may lose a Nobel Prize in literature, which is sort of a backhanded but nice compliment.
So I was part of a discovery in that we were trying to attempt to capture the earliest possible image of the creation event of the Big Bang, so-called epoch of inflation, which is sort of the spark that ignited the universe's explosive expansion that is theorized to exist and has a lot of evidence supporting it.
But it's missing one crucial piece of evidence called gravitational radiation waves of gravity that had not been observed and still have not been observed.
Spoiler alert.
But we claimed on St. Patrick's Day 2014 at Harvard University that we had witnessed the birth pangs of the Big Bang.
And this is something that was already spoken about for years, is guaranteed Nobel Prize worthy, etc.
And on the day of the announcement, you know, broadcast live to millions of people tuned in, it was a really celebrity, there was a viral YouTube video showing one of the creators receiving news and breaking down into tears, very touching thing that Stanford University put out.
And it really highlighted the outsized importance that the Nobel Prize has, not just in science, but in society as a whole.
I mean, you can win, you know, there's how many Oscars in this town?
How many Emmys?
There's only one Nobel Prize.
It's a unique, you know, a primus inter pares.
There's no other monopoly like it on earth.
And the Swedes guard it with, you know, a ferocity that, you know, I hadn't been expecting their backlash that I would get.
I mean, I expected some backlash.
But we announced this discovery, and the day of the announcement, famous scientists, Max Tegmark at MIT, won the Surefire Nobel Prize that day for its creators.
The only question is, who's going to win it?
And I created this experiment.
I pioneered the idea for searching for these waves of gravity based on an idea that one of my mentors at Caltech, Mark Kamiankowski and others, had proposed as a signature that would be the smoking gun of the Big Bang.
We set out to measure that smoking gun, and lo and behold, we found it.
And that happens quite frequently in science.
You set out to do something, and you discover what you set out to do.
And the famous Nobel laureate down not far from here, Caltech, Richard Feynman, said, the first principle is not to fool yourself.
And you are the easiest person to fool.
It's kind of like the science analogy of analog of the poker.
If you don't know who the sucker is after five minutes, you're the sucker.
Okay.
So you're the sucker in science.
You're going to believe what you see.
You're going to be deceived by what your heart wants, what your eyes see.
And therefore, science works hard to have independent confirmation.
And in our case, we were refuted rather quickly.
But I point out, because of this outsized importance of discovering the initial conditions of the universe, this and that had concomitant with that, the expectation of existence of the multiverse and a solution to the anthropic principle, that the very famous atheist scientist, self-proclaimed militant atheist Lawrence Krauss said, that the very famous atheist scientist, self-proclaimed militant atheist Lawrence Krauss said, it was the greatest discovery perhaps in all of humankind essentially in the New Yorker And it really, and also mentioned Nobel Prizes.
And I think it has come to dominate science in a very interesting way.
So, you know, you're here in Hollywood, you're very familiar with Hollywood, so I don't think, you know, when Hollywood, and I was on Scott Eastwood, who's the son of Clint Eastwood, I was on his wonderful podcast last year, and he invited me on.
I was talking some of these same ideas, riffing with him.
I was like, look, you're an actor, Scott, you've been in a lot of films, but, like, I don't think when the Hollywood studio makes a movie like some cruddy movie, like, let's say Fast and the Furious, whatever, I don't think they're expecting it to win an Oscar, but it provides the fuel, the cash, to make it... I was in The Fast and the Furious.
It was a delightful work of oeuvre.
So that was awkward, but he's a very sweet man.
But you better believe that they want...
a certain number of Oscars every year.
And the Nobel Prize, there's nothing else like it, as I said.
So I think there's an expectation for the analog of movie studios, which in science are funding agencies, universities, people that we work for, to get more funding to perpetuate these discoveries takes a lot of cash, just like it does in Hollywood.
And so there is a pressure on scientists and I felt it from an early age.
And one of my young readers, she read it and she said, I wish you wrote your book 10 years ago because my father told me, you know, you're probably never going to win a Nobel Prize and you're not a good scientist unless you win a Nobel Prize.
It's been held up.
I was told to get tenure, I had to be on a short track to get a Nobel Prize.
It's really an outsized thing and it dominates the way that science is perceived in the public And if you think about it, it's kind of arcane, right?
It owes itself to Alfred Nobel, who was the inventor of dynamite and was one of the wealthiest people in the 19th century.
And he endowed this prize for the benefit of all mankind.
So, you know, I don't know how relevant the Higgs boson is to you on a daily basis.
If you do, consult an astrophysicist.
In the case of scientists, what he really envisioned was things that were productive, like the x-ray.
That was something that could be used to benefit mankind instantly.
Dynamite even has beneficial purposes.
We've strayed far from that in the intent.
The question I ask in the book is, is his will, which is the most famous will in history, I claim, you know, no other will has had this impact.
And it's a twofold will, and maybe we'll get into this.
It's an ethical will as well as a material will.
He had no children, no wife that we know about.
And this will was endowed to benefit mankind.
So this hybrid purpose.
And since that time, it's been awarded, you know, many controversial, you know, warmongers.
You know, it's meant to devolve towards peace and benefit of humanity.
And it's gone to some crazy, crazy things.
On the whole, you know, most of the time it's correct.
I have no problem with the winners of it, but that it has so much importance that it really dominates.
Every four years, we're told by a group of 70 Nobel laureates, which Democrat we should vote for for president.
Or which type of food we should eat or what we should do with certain policies and Iran deal and so forth.
It's very interesting to show that humans need, it's like that Jack Nicholson line, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall.
We need to feel as a species that there are people that are these intellectual super titans and the Nobel Prize helps to cast them in solid gold.
So obviously there are those of us who have watched the Nobel Prize from afar.
I will admit, I don't really watch the Nobel Prize in physics as much as I watch the Nobel Peace Prize, just because that seems to be almost literally a practical joke every single year.
We've seen master terrorists like Yasser Arafat win it.
We've seen some pretty horrible people win the Nobel Peace Prize.
But how is it that the Nobel Prize in the sciences, which, you know, again, lay people tend to look at this like it is for the benefit of all mankind.
How does that actually pervert the practice of science?
Well, I think it sets up a narrative on how history is written and history is written in this way in the side of the victors.
In other words, it doesn't explore the paths that were went down and that we don't study things and the mentality of how we were actually practicing science.
So part of the book is a dirty lingerie expose on me and sort of my foibles and as a representative scientist who wanted to win it.
In my case, it was for a personal reason.
I wanted to win it.
You know, as a way of proving to myself and to my father, my late father, that this was an important, you know, that I was a great scientist.
He had been a great scientist and I want to be better than him.
And I found through many, many subtle messages from department chairs, from people that I knew, that the Nobel Prize is the key as this is really literally an idol that you can aspire to and actually possess and be elevated for all time.
I mean, there's 235 winners of the Nobel Prize in physics and, you know, only a few of them are living and there's more people that go to the space station every couple of years than are living Nobelists in physics.
So it's an incredibly prestigious thing to have.
And I think it kind of rewrites how science is actually done and how science should be done.
And here's a couple of ways to illustrate that.
One, the Nobel Prize, although Alfred Nobel said only one person can win it, instantly after his death they kind of revoked it.
And the question of should you treat the founding father the way we treat the Constitution or should it be a living document?
Should we adapt it, adjust it?
Leave that aside.
Nowadays they've generously made it so three people can win it.
So two years ago, which was the Nobel Prize period that I could have been eligible to win if our results hadn't been retracted, that Nobel Prize went to a discovery of gravitational waves, not from the Big Bang's birth pangs, but from the collision of two massive black holes one billion light years away.
These signals travel for a billion years, come into the Earth, shake up these detectors called LIGO, parts of which are led out of Caltech over here.
And that eventually resulted in the Nobel Prize, except for one of the three original founders of it, who had died essentially just about ten days too late.
So these signals, traveling at the speed of light for billion years, enter the detector, but ten days earlier had they entered it, but because the Nobel Prize doesn't allow posthumous awards and it doesn't allow more than three people to win it, Out of the 1,000-plus people that worked on this project and one of the key members of it, they did not receive the Nobel Prize.
And in fact, sometimes the Swedish committee goes through great pains to kind of write them out of history, rewrite history on how it was done.
Most of the time they reward correct topics.
But originally, science was supposed to be rewarded the year after the discovery was made.
The Nobel Prize was supposed to be awarded.
Nowadays it could be 40 years, it could be 30 years, it could be many, you know, in the case of the Higgs boson it was over 40 years.
So I think it sets up this narrative that, you know, history is written in science, you know, from this one perspective.
It's also, you know, Fairly exclusionary.
There's huge swaths of people that have been left out.
Most notably women, unfortunately.
Women astronomers in particular, as I detail in the book, have been really overlooked for titanic contributions.
Undoubtedly worthy of Nobel Prizes because the Nobel Prize went to their male PhD advisor, or their male partner in many cases.
So part of this is kind of, I come not to bury Alfred Nobel again, but I come to look at his will as an attorney would do, and say, how are we executing according to what he wanted, and how can we use this tool not to crucify it, but to use its image, to burnish its image, so that it doesn't get tarnished in the future.
So you work in a field of science that has some practical ramifications, but largely theoretical ramifications.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah.
Okay, so that being the case, how do you think that science of this sort should be funded?
So this is a rich sort of political debate right now.
There are a lot of folks on the right who say the government shouldn't be involved in funding any of this.
If we're going to take taxpayer dollars and spend it on things, then really we should be spending it on a wide variety of things that can benefit the public in very dramatic and immediate ways.
And then there's the group of folks who say, well, no, look, the government is empowered to spend money to advance science more generally, because you never know when the theoretical is going to turn material.
Where do you stand in this particular sort of debate?
Well, obviously, I'm biased.
I mean, I do believe when you hear that people spend more on lipstick in America than in NASA's entire budget, when you look at the rate of success of proposals, it's very, very low.
It takes months to write a proposal for a young professor starting out, needing to take care of his or her research group.
It costs millions of dollars.
I have an annual budget of several million dollars to keep a staff of 20 people together.
It's kind of like being a small business person.
It's a lot on my shoulders.
And when the era of declining funding, fortunately, private funding agencies are kind of reaching out and building up some of the basic science research.
Now, you're getting at a point which is important.
There's fundamental science, which is what I do, you know, saying forces, fields, early universe things that may not have any practical technological application.
And I always say, you know, it's interesting, you know, people expect basic research to produce technology because it's had a great record.
I mean, there's no better tool to get something practical than something that was originally fundamental or basic research.
So I think you have to have, to get the latter you need the former, and it may be serendipitous.
I point out in the book, you know, some of the greatest things that have ever happened were serendipitous.
The discovery of the x-ray machine, no serendipitous.
The discovery that the universe is accelerating currently, serendipitous.
We didn't expect it, we expected the opposite.
So, you know, when you think about, well, how could money be spent better in the budget of the United States?
I think, you know, we think of science as not part of a culture, but it really should be thought of as a culture.
It enriches our lives.
Some of the greatest contributions to civilization have come from science and partial of physics, but math and logic.
And thinking about that as a contributor, why is it not worth more?
In other words, why could we only think about in terms of the practical benefits?
That it produces.
What does a Rembrandt do?
What does it do?
Well, it's obviously valuable, but what can it do?
What can a baby do?
It's the potential for what it can actually achieve.
That's what matters.
And that's why I think it should be, you know, it should be produced, it should be funded to the extent that is, you know, that's commensurate with the level of scientists that are being employed and the amount of productivity that they have.
And maybe, in my case, not with regard to how many Nobel Prizes it produces.
What is the breakdown in terms of funding from private versus public for projects like the ones that you work on?
So the federal government has gone through phases of differing amounts of largesse.
And I think right now, unfortunately, we're in a minimum where you have a very low chance, maybe less than one in five, of getting a proposal accepted.
And these are not just like cranks that write me every couple of days, you know, Professor Keating, Einstein was wrong.
Here, I can prove why, but no one will give me money.
Okay, well, fine.
I won't give you money either.
And I'm going to delete this email.
But the point, I think, is it is becoming much harder for the government.
And so private funding agencies, such as the Simons Foundation, the Gordon Moore Foundation, and many other private foundations, I'm just talking about astronomy, have stepped up to the plate to actually fill in gaps.
And they've received criticism, which is to be expected.
Oh, you're just pursuing something for some billionaire's personal intellectual curiosity.
At the end of the day, I look at a hospital and I say, some kid is going to go there.
Do I care if someone's name is on that hospital?
The important thing is that this thing gets done.
It's an old tradition.
It goes back to my hero Galileo.
He discovered the moons of Jupiter and he didn't name them after himself and his daughters.
He named them after his patrons, the Medici family.
He called them the Medici stars.
And nowadays we name the telescopes after the donors, and we convince them that the discoveries will come later.
So I want to come back to something that you spoke about a little bit earlier, and that is the multiverse theory.
So I asked you earlier if there's any proof of the multiverse or why people are throwing the multiverse out there.
Again, this seems to be the hot topic of the day.
So where do you come down on the actual?
So the multiverse is this theory that conjectures that there are not one universe, just as there's not one planet.
there's at least eight planets in our solar system, Just as there's not one star in the sun, there's a hundred billion in our galaxy alone.
Just as there's not one galaxy, there's a hundred billion or maybe a half a trillion galaxies.
Maybe there's more than one universe.
Maybe there's many more than one universe.
Maybe there's an infinite number of universes.
And infinity is a pretty big number, you know, especially near the top.
And thinking about that, it really means that almost anything that can happen will happen.
Anything is possible in a multiverse.
So in a multiverse, you know, your wife is a podcaster and she brags about her husband the doctor.
And facts care lovingly and deeply about feelings.
And the multiverse has these conjectures that in a sense cannot be tested because by definition it's not part of what's called our observable universe.
Now critics of when I say things like that or other people say, well next year we could bump into another universe.
And there are theories about how we could actually realize that.
But I think it's sort of, it was conjectured as a part, as sort of a counterpart.
Although the history of the multiverse goes back maybe 800 years and people thinking about what is a world, what is a universe and conflating the two.
But the modern conception really began in the 1970s as an answer to the Copernican sort of principle and saying, why are we here?
And only being able to maybe interpret that, the improbability, the fine-tuning that we exist in, by an ensemble of perhaps an infinite number of universes, all of which but one may be completely unobservable.
Well, I mean, I'm at least hoping that if there is a crossover, then it looks a lot like Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse, because that is the best of the Spider-Man films, as we can all acknowledge.
We can all agree on all various sides.
So in a second, I want to ask you a final question.
That is, as a scientist and as a person who's a religious believer, What should scientists understand about religious people, and what should religious people understand about scientists that they're completely missing?
Because they occupy different spaces.
If you want to hear Brian Keating's answer to that question, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
To subscribe, head on over to dailywire.com.
Click subscribe, you can hear the end of our conversation over there.
Brian Keating, thank you so much for stopping by.
It's been wonderful.
Thank you, Ben.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate your time.
Thank you.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Associate producer, Colton Haas.
Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.
Post-production is supervised by Alex Zingara.
Editing by Donovan Falwell.
Audio is mixed by Mike Peromino.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
Title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.
▲
Export Selection