Dr. Brian Keating: Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Brian Keating. Dr. Brian Keating is a professor of cosmology at the University of California San Diego.

Today's discussion is perhaps the most zoomed out discussion that we've ever had on this podcast. What I mean by that is today we talk about the origins of the universe. We talk about the Earth's relationship to the sun and to the other planets. We talk a lot about optics, so not just the neuroscience of vision and our ability to see things up close and far away, but to see things very, very far away or very, very close up using telescopes or microscopes, respectively.

So today's discussion is a far-reaching one, literally and figuratively, and one that I know everyone will appreciate because it really will teach you how the scientific process is carried out. It will also help you understand that science is indeed a human endeavor.

and that much of what we understand about ourselves and about the world around us, and indeed the entire universe, is filtered through that humanness. But I want to be very clear that today's discussion is not abstract. You're going to learn a lot of concrete facts about the universe, about humanity, and about the process of discovery. In fact, much of what we talk about today is about the process of humans discovering things about themselves

and about the world. Dr. Keating has an incredible perspective and approach to science, having built, for instance, giant telescopes down at the South Pole and having taken on many other truly ambitious builds in service to this thing we call discovery.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desired effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, this podcast episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Brian Keating.

Dr. Brian Keating. Welcome. Dr. Andrew Huberman. It's great to meet you in person. Finally, I thought you were a legend. I exist in real life and you do as well. And I'm delighted that we're going to talk today because I have a long standing adoration. There's no other appropriate word for eyes, vision, optics, the stars, the moon, the sun. I mean,

animals, humans, what's more interesting than how we got here and how we see things and what we see and why. That's right. You're a physicist. You're a cosmologist, not a cosmetologist. That's right. I do do hair and makeup if you're interested. Please orient us in the galaxy. So I get to study, you know, the entire universe, basically, and it's not really such a stretch that cosmetology and cosmology share this prefix because

The prefix cosmos is what relates those two words together that seem to be completely unrelated to each other, right? But it turns out the word cosmos in Greek, the etymology of it, is beautiful, or appearance. So we have a beautiful appearance, you know, we look a certain way, we're attracted to certain things. But it kind of reflects the fact that the night sky is also beautiful, attractive, and evokes something disorderly in us. We humans are born

with two refracting telescopes in our skulls, embedded in our skulls. And as you point out, the retina is outside the cranial vault. I'll never forget you saying that. That means we have astronomical detection tools built into us. We don't have tools to detect the Higgs boson built into us, or to look at a microscopic virus or something like that. So astronomy is not only the oldest of all sciences. It's the most visceral one, so connects us.

And of the sciences, of that branch of science, of astronomical sciences, cosmology is really the most overarching. It really includes everything, all physical processes that were involved in the formation, a matter of energy, maybe of time itself. And it speaks to a universal urge, I think, to know what came before us. Like I always ask people, I'll ask you, I know what the answer is, probably. But what's your favorite day on the calendar? Favorite day on the calendar?

I love New Year's Day. New Year's Day, exactly. What is that? It's a beginning. Some people say their birthday, their kids' birthday, their smart, their anniversary. You want to get too out of control with the misses. What are those? Those are beginnings. What's the only event that no entity could even bear witness to? The origin of the universe.

I think that speaks to something primal in human beings that are curious at least. We want to uncover the secrets of what existed, what came before us. And we don't have any way of seeing that currently. So we have to use the fossils that have made their way throughout all of cosmic time to understand what that was like at the very beginning of time and perhaps

maybe about the universe as it existed before time itself began. So to me, it's incredibly fascinating. It encompasses all of science in some sense. It even can include life on other planets, consciousness, the formation of the brain. And to me, I'm always interested in the biggest questions. And the biggest topics that evoke curiosity in me is how did it all get here? And so that's what cosmology allows us to do. Apply the strict, exacting laws of physics.

to a specific domain, which is the origin of everything in the universe. That's what makes it so fascinating. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need, but nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, all in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Proper hydration is critical for optimal brain and body function. Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish cognitive and physical performance.

It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium are vital for the functioning of all the cells in your body, especially your neurons or your nerve cells. Drinking element dissolved in water makes it extremely easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes. To make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of hydration and electrolytes, I dissolve one packet of element in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I wake up in the morning and I drink that basically first thing in the morning.

I also drink element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and therefore losing a lot of water and electrolytes. They have a bunch of different great tasting flavors of element. They have watermelon, citrus, etc. Frankly, I love them all. And now that we're in the winter months in the northern hemisphere, element has their chocolate medley flavors back in stock.

I really like the chocolate flavors, especially the chocolate mint when it's heated up, so you put it in hot water, and that's a great way to replenish electrolytes and hydrate, especially when it's cold and dry outside, when hydration is especially critical. If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free element sample pack with the purchase of any element drink mix. Again, that's drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free sample pack. Today's episode is also brought to us by BetterHelp.

BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. I've been doing weekly therapy for well over 30 years. Initially, I didn't have a choice. It was a condition of being allowed to stay in school. But pretty soon I realized that therapy is an extremely important component to overall health. In fact, I consider doing regular therapy just as important as getting regular exercise, including cardiovascular exercise and resistance training, which of course, I also do every week.

There are essentially three things that great therapy provides. First of all, it provides a good rapport with somebody that you can trust and talk to about all issues that you're concerned about. Second of all, it can provide support in the form of emotional support or directed guidance. And third, expert therapy can provide useful insights. With better help, they make it very easy to find an expert therapist with whom you resonate with and can provide those benefits that come through effective therapy.

Also, because BetterHelp allows therapy to be done entirely online, it's very time-efficient. It's easy to fit into a busy schedule. There's no commuting to a therapist's office or sitting in a waiting room or anything like that. You simply go online and hold your appointment. If you would like to try BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.com slash Huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.com slash Huberman.

before we get to the origins of the universe and the organization of the planets relative to the sun and their spins, et cetera, you said something that at least to me feels intuitively so true and I think it's very likely to be true for everybody, which is that there's something about looking up into space, especially at night when we see the stars and hopefully see the stars. We'll talk about light pollution a little bit later. When we see the stars that

Yes, we know these things are far away. Yes, we know that they occupy a certain position in space. They have a diameter, et cetera. We might not know what that is. Just by looking at them, you probably do. But they also change our perception of time. And if I were to say one thing about the human brain, especially, is that sure, it's got all these autonomic functions. It regulates heart rate, digestion, et cetera, sleep, wake cycles.

It can remember, it can think, it can have states like rage or anger or happiness or delight. But what's remarkable about the human brain is that it can think into the past, it can be quote unquote present, and it can project into the future. And I'm sure other animals can do that, but we do this exquisitely well and we make plans on the basis of this ability to contract or expand our notion of time.

As a non-biologist, but somebody who I think appreciates and understands biology, why do you think it is that when we look up into the sky, even though most people might not realize that those stars probably aren't there in occupying the position that we think they are, some of them probably are, some of them aren't, they existed a long time ago, but without knowing that, why do you think that looking up at the stars gives us the sense of an expansion of time, as opposed to just the expansion of space? Well, first of all, we have to take ourselves back.

you know, deep prehistory. We know that ancients were looking at, um, at the constellations because they were seemingly either in control of or correlated with or perhaps causative of the seasons. And that was a, you know, divine, important, you know, supreme importance for them, right? They're all existence in an early agrarian societies, hunting societies, gathering societies. Um, so they had to know about time. So time, the, the essence of time and that,

And large scale for seasons, for holidays, for festivals, for propitiation of DEDs and so forth, they had to keep track of it. And that's why in the caves in Lascaux that date back to the 40,000 BCE, they depict constellations, Orion the Hunter, Taurus the Bull, all these different constellations, they depict them there.

Now, partially that was because Netflix didn't exist back then, right? There was no TikTok, and so there wasn't much to do at night. And in fact, the more you're at at night, you probably increased your opportunity to be consumed by some predator, right? So you were more focused on being stationary, observing. And as I said, we can do astronomy, uniquely so, amongst all the sciences, with just the equipment we're born with.

You know, measurements with our eyes with respect to landmarks to calculate patterns and humans are exceptionally good at recognizing patterns, sometimes too good. So for instance, knowing that a certain swath of stars is present at one time of year and not another relative to say.

the contour of a mountain ridge. Yes, and the repetition of it, over and passed down through generations, before there was written language, there was pictography, there was the cave paintings and so forth. There was oral language, and that was it. For, you know, written language is only 10,000 years old or something like that.

So to store information, that meant it was a continuity between generations. My great-good-good-grandfathers, elders, whatever, taught me that when the moon is in this constellation, the sun is in this constellation, we should plant or we should harvest in other times. And so we still do use the rotation of the Earth hasn't changed that much since this 40,000-year period. I mean, the axis in which it rotates, that's a different story.

But the actual spin rate, the angular momentum of the Earth has not appreciably changed that much. And so the positions of these objects were of such importance that the ancients would use them for all these purposes. But there were so few things that changed position that they actually had names for them. They're called planets. So planet in Greek

It's like the word plane, like airplane. It means something that moves or wanders. So when you name something, it means it's pretty different from the other things in which are not associated with that characteristic. So the planets, there were only five that they could see at that time up to Saturn. And they actually would associate those not only with astronomical events, but events down on Earth. That's what connected the Earth. So we have legacy of that in our calendar today.

So Sunday, the end of the Sunday, Monday, Moon, Tuesday, and you go to the Latin languages. I think it's Mercury Day, which is Mercury Day, Vantra Day, Venus Day, so do you go to the Romance languages? And then the only one that's not a Latin name is, of course, for Thor, the God Thor Thursday. And then it comes back Saturday, Saturday, so they were all used as a clock. And people don't really grasp this. I mean, we have an Apple Watch, we have whatever.

We didn't have a clock that was functional that would work on all different time zones and all different conditions on the pitching deck of a ship until the 1700s, basically. It was a huge problem. And so measuring time became crucial for commerce, for human culture and civilization to arise, for education, and obviously for planting, harvesting, and so forth. So there was an obvious connection between the two. They believed, actually, that they were causative.

that actually the position of the planet Jupiter determined something on the day of your birth and the sun's relative position with respect to it, determine something about your future and your prospects in life and so forth. So when I'm not confused for a cosmetologist, because of my lovely hair and makeup, I'm usually asked, oh, you're an astronomer. I'm a Virgo. So what's going to happen to me?

I'm like, I used to be like, OK, that's an astrologer. I'm not an astrologer. But now I just lean into it. I'm like, ooh, that you're going to get a letter from the IRS next week and add that lump on your ass. You mean you're playing games with them? Yeah. You don't believe in astrology. There's no evidence for astrology. In fact, there's many, many random controlled trials, double-bun study that showed not only is it, it's almost counter to the evidence.

And they say that a monkey can throw a dart at a stock chart and get, you know, do better than most hedge fund managers or something like that. Actually, astrologers are even worse. Like, I don't even know a protozoa can throw a dart. Yeah, it's almost anti-correlated, you know, with what reality is. So no, there's certainly no validity to that. And I added, you know, provocative tweet, you know, whatever, post recently.

And it was about, there's actually, you know, we believe there are 12 zodiac signs. And that dates back to the Persians and the Babylonians and how they divided up them. And it almost divides, you know, they were fascinated with the number 60. So that was the base of their number system. Her number system is 10 because we have 10 figures. For some reason, they love base 60. I don't know why. And so they love things that divide it evenly into it. 10 does, but anyway, you know, hashtag fail for the Babylonians. But they divided it up into 12.

12 zodiac signs. We still use those. This is a problem though. Do you know what this is? Do you know what determines your zodiac sign?

No. Okay. So it's determined by the position of the sun, what constellation was the sun in on the day you were born? September 26th. So when the, that means that the sun was in the constellation Virgo. Oh, no, you were a Libra. Libra. Okay. So you do know what you are, but you don't know why you are. So Libra means it's a constellation. There's 88 constellations.

that are accepted by astronomers. And one of them is Libra. And the path that the sun and the moon and all the planets travel, and it's called the zodiac, it's confined to a plane because the same protosolar system disk from which we formed out of. All the planets came out of a nebular cloud, a cloud of gas, dust, rocks, and so forth that came from a pre-existing star that exploded, creating what's called a supernova.

The supernova provided the materials to make not only the earth, but the entire solar system, including the sun. That happened about five billion years ago. And four billion years ago, the earth formed out of that cloud. The spin of that disk, all things have a spin associated with them, like a figure skater, you know, she's spinning around on her axis or whatever, she can have her arms out.

brings them in, she spins faster. That's called conservation of angular momentum. Spin is a type of angular momentum. The whole disk is spinning in a plane. It's like this desk, this table, that we're sitting at. If you're listening, imagine a flat table. It's spinning, a circular disk is spinning with a certain direction. All the objects are moving in that same direction due to conservation of this term called angular momentum.

The sun moves in that, apparently, moves in that position. Obviously, we're rotating around the sun, but it looks like the sun's coming around us. The moon is Jupiter. So in the day you were born, there's a constellation behind the sun from our perspective that was Libra on September 26. And that was the day that you were born. That determines the fact that you're a Libra. But there's a problem.

In December, where we are now, the sun is actually in a different constellation, the one that doesn't exist according to the zodiac that was created something like 6,000, 5,000 years ago. It's called Ophiuchus. So there's a certain segment of people born in a 17-day stretch.

in December, late November to early December, that are actually Ophiuchans or Ophiuchases or whatever. So that should obliterate astrology as any semblance of a science because they didn't even know this constellation existed and yet something like 12% of all people share that constellation. So it's just complete nonsense. There's no validity to it. Twins that are born on the same day have radically different histories, past futures,

And there's no predictive power to it. And that's what science is about, right? We want to make a hypothesis, test it, iterate on it, and have confirmation of it. And there's zero, in fact, for astrology. In fact, if you'll permit me a kind of silly story, when I was dating my wife, who'd become my wife in the beginning, she kind of thought it's fun, maybe we'll go see someone who can tell our fortunes. We belong together, so we went to an astrologer.

And the astrologer asked me a bunch of questions, you know, when were you born, obviously. And, oh, no, she asked me what's your sign? So I said, I'm a Gemini. And she said, OK, cool. And then she told me a bunch of things. And at the end, I said, I just want to double check. I was playing kind of a, you know, a little bit of a jerk sometimes. So I said, I just want to confirm, Gemini is born in September. I'm born in September 9.

So oh, no, no, that's a Virgo. But the same things are going to happen to you anyway. It didn't change her outcome. And so in the language of the science philosophy of science, Karl Popper, others, it's unfalsifiable. And you cannot be proven right. It's so flexible. You're going to find challenges. The stock market is going to fluctuate. Political turmoil rained during your life. They're so flexible. It can accommodate any story. And that's a hallmark of non-science or sometimes anti-scientific thinking.

One thing that really strikes me is the fact that, at least just the way you describe it, the first clock, the first time keeping approach or mechanism was to evaluate the position of things in the sky relative to celestial landmarks.

So irrespective of when people are born in astrology, I could imagine a tribe of people, a group of people who have charts because they've painted them onto some surface, doesn't matter what the surface is, that at some portion of the year, the stars are above this ridge. There are three bright stars above the ridge just to the left of the front of the village, so to speak. This is not an unreasonable thing to imagine.

And that information is passed down in the form of when those three stars are about to disappear behind that ridge, days are getting shorter. Whereas when those three stars are reemerging again, elsewhere in the sky, days are getting longer. Forgive me, this will be a little bit of a long question. Sometimes the listeners get upset with me, but I think it will frame it within the biology in a way that will be meaningful for us and for everyone.

Other animals, besides humans, have this thing, the pineal gland that secretes melatonin. The duration of melatonin release is directly related to how much light there is. In other words, light suppresses melatonin. Therefore, in short days, aka long nights, you get a lot more melatonin released. In long days and short nights, you get less melatonin. So this is the intrinsic clockkeeping mechanism of all mammalian species and reptiles.

Most people don't realize this, but reptiles often have either a thin skull, birds have a very thin skull, so that light can actually pass through the skull to the pineal. Some reptiles actually have pits in the top of their heads that light can pass directly in to the pineal. These are animals that remind you also have eyes for perceiving things, but this is the primordial, biologically primordial timekeeping device.

And you imagine why this would be really important. And then I'll get back to why I think that because humans have a pineal that's embedded deep in the brain, light cannot, despite what some people think out there. I'm not going to name names, but light cannot get through the skull to the pineal, nor is putting a light in your ears going to get there, or even in the roof of your mouth, very unlikely, maybe some distant stimulation of the

neurons in your hypothalamus with long wavelength. But in any case, the pineal of humans is embedded deep in the skull. And so that information about how much light is in the environment has to be passed through the eyes, through a circuit, through a circuitous path to the pineal. But here's the thing. Here's the conundrum. An animal or human born into an eight-hour day

when days are getting longer has a very different future as an infant, as an infant or baby that's born into an eight hour day when days are getting shorter, especially if you live closer to the poles further from the equator. So think about this. You're a pregnant woman or you're the husband of that pregnant woman and you have a baby coming.

You need to know that days are getting longer or shorter and what that means for resources because the probability of the survival of that child and even the mother during and immediately after childbirth was strongly dictated by what resources were available, the strength of the immune system, et cetera. Animals solve this by light going directly into the pineal.

I'm not one of those animals, so I don't know if they're conscious of this. Humans need to solve this some other way. They needed to know whether or not days were getting longer or shorter. And so the question I have is, is the movement of the stars or planets detectable enough with these telescopes that we have in the front of our skull?

Is it perceivable enough that one could know whether or not days were getting longer or shorter simply by looking up at the sky at night? Or are the shifts imperceptible and therefore you would need to create these charts? And now I think it's kind of obvious while I'm asking this question because to me, this is the reason to chart time. And this is the reason it occurs to me why looking up at the sky at night is meaningful for tracking time. Absolutely.

And not only correlated with that, something even more perhaps basic is temperature, right? In the hemisphere that you're born in, you would expect that all, I'm born as I said, September 9th. Turns out that's statistically most common birthday of humans on Earth.

And why is that? People are busy during the winter holiday. Exactly, right? So there's a correlation, right? Yeah, they're at home and they're indoor at home and they're and they're they're pro-creating. And they're so right. Right. Or another thing is what month you're born in when you go back nine months. So actually the you know, capitalism is awesome, right? So it's so efficient. So when you go to CVS, I've known this, you know, several times, thank God, because my wife's been pregnant several times.

And we have several kids. And when you go to CVS, it's actually pretty interesting. She goes there to buy a pregnancy test. Now, she's the kind of neurotic person. She had to buy like five pregnancy tests for each kid. I don't know why, but that's what she did. She likes data. Okay, everybody's statistics. How do you reduce variability?

increased sample size. Yes, unless it's a systematic error. And that's what I want to talk to you about later when it comes to the eye and other things. You go to CVS, you buy a pregnancy test, and you know, she's on their gold plan program, whatever. She got the gold card from CVS because she's owned so many times. But when you go there, they know you're getting a pregnancy test. So exactly nine months later, we start getting advertisements for pampers and for diapers and for diaper creams and wives and stuff. Because they know

They're hedging even without knowing the results of the test. What's the downside for them? Well, she buys five tests. They're probably assuming something very different than if she bought one test. Anyway, so the temperature, right? So if you're gestating during summertime versus wintertime, that obviously will have some kind of effect. I mean, you can tell me a lot more than that. But more than that, you hinted at this. And I'm not going to make you do any math surrounding pregnancy. But God forbid.

I sympathize with you. I defended you. I was talking fast. The irony of that one, I'll just say for the record, I'm just blushing. The irony of that one is that we publish numerous times for my lab cumulative probability, and I teach this stuff. I know. It's oftentimes when you're going fast, but that one I totally deserve. I love it. Whatever shades of red I might turn. That's what a good scientist does. But they actually think that the first astronomers were women.

because they noticed this correlation. What's their monthly cycle? Their menstrual cycle is exactly 29 and a half days. Which is actually the lunar cycle down to almost a minute. It's insane, right? That they would have looked up and noticed this renewal and diminishing of the moon. And that there's actually evidence, now they weren't professional astronomers until, you know, actually the first professional female astronomer was until like the 1700s in England.

where she was recognized for using telescopes and so forth. But no, they were very keen on that. And they were probably dialed into that and what that poor tended as you alluded to for the future of their child. I mean, this is a huge biological investment. Men don't have that. So actually, we are less symmetrical. You know this than women, right? We have our testes or different links or whatever, I guess, normal men at least. But women are more symmetrical. But they're actually, they have an extra timekeeping device that men, we can't relate to that. They're menstrual cycle. They're menstrual cycle.

And some women are keenly aware of the ovulation event. They will describe it as a feeling as if it's breaking off and migrating within them. And I have every reason to believe them. Earlier, you asked, and I know this will get some people years pricked up, whether or not when a child is born with respect to the seasonal cycle.

It impacts that child. There, there are a lot of data around this. It depends on the environment in which one lives. So closer to the equator. Yeah. It's very different situation because the equal day is all day long. There were some data and I'd love to get an update on this. So that somebody knows they can put in the comments that, you know, the schizophrenia was far more prevalent as you move away from the equator. And then there was a guy at Caltechy has since passed but had

some interesting data about mothers who contracted influenza during a certain phase of the second trimester, heightened probability for schizophrenic offspring, but big, big caveat here. None of it was causal, of course, and then there are all sorts of interesting things about, you know,

placental effects and so there's all there. It's a multi variable. Yeah. And we know that because identical twins even that share the same choreonic sack. Right. One can be schizophrenic in the other. No, although there is a higher concordance than it say they're different. They're a dichorionic to different sacks. So, but time of birth relative to the seasons. Sure. Seasons correlating, of course, with abundance or lack of food, abundance or lack of

various infectious diseases, influenza in particular. These things are relevant. But we'd have to make a real big stretch to then include the effects of the planet Jupiter, which is the biggest planet, and is most of the mass of our solar system outside of the sun. Then it would be clear, and you could do this test with identical twins, and that are identical for fraternal twins. Twins that are raised with the same pairing are separated at birth, and they turn out

very much more similarly when they're identical twins, such as genetics play more of a role than we like to think. I realize this is a bit politically incorrect to say in certain venues, but genes are extremely powerful. Yeah, why wouldn't they be? Absolutely. I mean, nurture matters as well, but genes are immensely powerful. And I think that gives us help. People say, well, we should

Not be so haughty we should not be so arrogant you know we we have what 50% of the same chromosomes as a fruit fly you know like who are you to be and I say I'll do you one better like I think some bonobos have 98% similarity but that should give us more you know sort of like treat ourselves and think of ourselves in a way that's more.

you know, you know, more elevated, I would say, because we're not that. There's many species of chimpanzees and primates and so there's only one human, you know, homo sapien, which, you know, a lot of people don't know the word, you know, homo sapien, which is our species and our genes. Sapien doesn't mean, it doesn't mean knowledge, like science. Ciencia means knowledge. Sapiens means wisdom.

And I like to look at the etymology, I'm fascinated by it, but it kind of highlights what we should be doing and what is it that we are aware of. I mean, I'm curious, have you ever encountered, like, why are we called, you know, humans that, like, the wise hominid? And it's because we're the only entity organism that knows it's going to die. Yes, there's some elephants that, you know, before one dies and one will take care. It's not the same as, like, you knew you were going to die when you were a kid. Very young.

And it's that awareness of death and the awareness of how special we are. I think that's what invests life with a lot more meaning. I don't want to get too full of solvable time perception. That's exactly what I've said. I mean, I'm an expert on happiness sitting here. And then Morgan Halso is an expert on the relationship between psychological happiness and money sitting here. And he described this cartoon, which inevitably makes me chuckle of a guy and his dog sitting by a lake and that

There's a bubble, you know, sort of bubbles coming out of the guy's head. And he's thinking about whatever his stock portfolio and things back home, et cetera. And out of the dog's head is just a mirror image of him sitting with his owner. The dogs are very present. But what that also means is that they are not

able to perceive their own existence within within time as you said before, we can forecast we that's how we don't have the strongest muscles, the sharpest claws, the biggest teeth, right? What do we have? We have this frontal prefrontal cortex that allows us to to do what are called good Duncan or thought experiments Einstein said, to predict the future to model the future not really predicted we can't do that, but we can model likely outcomes and we can simulate in our minds what those would be like.

And we're so dependent on that skill that we sometimes confuse, you know, correlation for causation. And as you know, everyone who confuses correlation with causation ends up dying. So it's very dangerous to do that. But the point is, the notion of what's called confirmation bias is prevalent in every human being, scientists or not. And in fact, as scientists, we have to guard against that more than anybody because nothing really feels better than like,

thinking of a hypothesis, modeling the future, and then feeling like you're right, and then you get celebrated and fed, and maybe you win a golden medallion with Alfred Nobel's image on it or whatever. Those kinds of things are very powerful, and those kinds of things are also very dangerous, which is why it appeals to so many more people to think that the celestial orbs play a role in our lives. It's almost like we've reverted to a paganistic existence, where we want to believe there's some force responsible for our fate, when maybe it's random.

I totally agree with you. I'll play devil's advocate for a moment, not for astrology per se, but for instance, there are many species that use magneto-reception. They can sense magnetic fields. I think turtles do this, some migrating birds do this, some pigeons. There's even some evidence that within the, I believe this is still true, that within the eye of the fly, the fruit fly, that there are some magneto-receptors. So it turns out,

There are some humans that perform better than chance in a magneto-reception perceptual task. This is very surprising to me. It can be trained up somewhat, but I'm sure there are a number of people hearing this that they themselves feel that they can sense magnetic fields. There is a capacity to do that greater than chance in some individuals. It's a very weak capacity. So I think humans love the idea that there is something

um, skills or, um, uh, qualities beyond our, uh, reflexive understanding that we all harbor this idea that we have superpowers that we just need to tap into six cents, right? You know, six cents or this person has a stroke and suddenly is speaking conversational French and therefore, you know, neuroplasticities, you know, et cetera. Or, uh, what's a prep perception or, um, our, our colleague, when you were at San Diego, um, from, uh, Chandra, like, um, the synesthesia, right?

Certainly, synesthesia exists. People who will hear a certain key on the piano and immediately evokes the perception of a particular color, not just red, but a particular shade of red in a very consistent way. Now, if that was useful for something, maybe it is useful. I mean, it might be unusual. Cross-modal plasticity is what we would call it.

Yeah. But so could that not be made into an argument? Well, that means that this is a general feature that we just don't know how to access, but maybe we could go to the gym and mental gym or do something to enhance that, like you said. I don't know. Some people do that with infrared, near-infrared wavelengths that they

do some kind of training and they claim they can see certain things. The question is, how useful is it? And then how predictive is it? And I don't think that we can make a case for the predictive elements of the position, as I said, of Mars and Mercury being in retrograde as it is now. But the thing that's shocking is that, look, there's a whole page in almost every newspaper except the excurable New York Times. No, I'm just kidding. That New York Times doesn't have to.

It's very interesting. I'll tell you off the earth, a recent encounter I've had with the New York Times. But most newspapers have more, you know, hundreds of times more ink written about astrology than astronomy. I mean, it's barely, it'll barely be in there. And why is that? It's capitalistic society. So people crave this notion that there's some explanation for the random seeming events that occur in their lives. And that's an urge as ancient as, you know, human civilization itself.

I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens. AG1 is designed to cover all of your foundational nutritional needs, and it tastes great. Now I've been drinking AG1 since 2012, and I started doing that at a time when my budget for supplements was really limited. In fact, I only had enough money back then to purchase one supplement, and I'm so glad that I made that supplement, AG1.

The reason for that is even though I strive to eat most of my foods from whole foods and minimally processed foods, it's very difficult for me to get enough fruits, vegetables, vitamins and minerals, micronutrients, and adaptogens from food alone. And I need to do that in order to ensure that I have enough energy throughout the day, I sleep well at night, and keep my immune system strong.

But when I take AG1 daily, I find that all aspects of my health, my physical health, my mental health, and my performance both cognitive and physical are better. I know that because I've had lapses when I didn't take AG1 and I certainly felt the difference. I also notice and this makes perfect sense given the relationship between the gut microbiome and the brain.

that when I regularly take AG1, which for me means serving in the morning or mid-morning and again later in the afternoon or evening, that I have more mental clarity and more mental energy. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim a special offer.

For this month only January 2025, AG1 is giving away 10 free travel packs and a year supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim the 10 free travel packs and a year supply of vitamin D3K2. It speaks to what I think is one of the core functions of the human brain which

you know, umbrellas, everything we're talking about, which is the human brain is a prediction-making machine. And it wants to make predictions on the basis of things that feel reliable. And the ability for us to go, well, confirmation bias, the ability for us to link A and

a T as opposed to A, B, C and work through things linearly and try and disprove our own hypotheses is much stronger than any desire to work through things systematically unless you're trained as a scientist. And so it's no surprise to me that people

want to understand themselves and understand others in a way that feels at least semi-reliable and to do that in a way where they don't have to run a ton of experiments and hence astrology. I'd like to stay within this vein of thought, but you said something earlier that's been kind of nagging in the back of my brain. You said we have two refracting telescopes in the front of our skull. I will often remind people that

your retinas that line the back of your eyes like a pie crust are part of your brain, your central nervous system that was literally squeezed out of your skull during the first trimester through a whole genetic program that's very beautiful. And this might freak you out, but think about it, this is the only portion of your brain that resides outside the cranial vault.

technically still in your skull, but outside the cranial vault gives humans an enormous capacity that they wouldn't have otherwise because what you can make judgments about space and time, space based on what's next to what, what's far from what, and time based on movement of things, relative to stationary objects, et cetera.

that we wouldn't otherwise be able to perform. You could sense odors at a distance, smoke, et cetera, but it's a whole other business to have these two telescopes. Could you explain what you mean by two refracting telescopes? Because I think that will set the stage nicely for some of our other discussion about optics.

Yeah, so I've been in love with telescopes since the age of about 12 when I could first afford one to buy one of my own. And that really came out of the fact that I recognized the limitations of the human eye. It turned out I was 12 years old, woke up in the middle of the night one night. There was this

incredibly bright light, you know, brighter than these lights here shining into my room. And I was like, well, I don't know, there's a street light outside. This is crazy. I mean, look outside and see what it is. And it was the moon. And I had never seen it was near a moon set, which is near sunrise, full moon.

And I looked at it, and I kept staring at it, and there was a star next to it that kind of looked like a piece of the moon had broken off. It was that bright and that clear, and it's unusual to see these kinds of things together. They're actually known as scisages, which is a great scrabble word, if you're ever, you know, pressed for a win in scrabble. You use the word scisage, I think it's like 80 points.

And that just means a conjunction, an alignment of astronomical objects. I was like, what the hell is this? This is 1984, Andrew. You're younger than me. But Google did not exist for another 16 years. And I was kind of impatient. I wanted to know what this thing was. What is this thing? It's not moving. It's not flashing. It's not a drone back then. It's not Southwest Airlines, right?

So I'm looking at it. It's not moving. And day after day, it was like that. And I was like, how am I going to find this out? Like imagine existed. We're so blessed that we have the internet and we have these LLMs. It's so easy now to be a scientist or do research. And anybody can do research. Science is for everybody, right? You always highlight that fact.

So I realized the only way to find out about it was to wait for the New York Times to get delivered on Sunday, because they did have a section back then that they don't have now called Cosmos. And in it, it depicted what the night sky looked like that night, which is a Sunday, and that was like three or four days after what, you know, I had this observation, which, you know, it was incredibly, you know, observant. And I looked at it and it was the moon, it showed the moon, and it showed Jupiter.

I was like, what? You can see a planet with your naked eye. This was around the time Voyager was going behind the planets and the Grand Tour, the solar system had never been done before. I was like, I thought you needed a spaceship. And I realized that was my first bit of astronomical research. I looked up. I had a hypothesis. What is it? I was wrong. I thought it was a star. It was a planet.

I was like, this is insane. You know, imagine what I could see if I had a telescope, but I couldn't afford a telescope. We were pretty modest means back then. I had a job working on a delicatessen down the street, and I'd do that once a week, and then, you know, I got a grant from a three-letter agency, you know, which is the beginning of many, many scientist careers. I got a grant from the MOM agency, my mother. She supplemented my $2 an hour salary at the Venice delicatessen in Dobbsbury, and I ended up getting a telescope for $75.

and cherish this thing. And then I was like, oh, let me look at these things in the sky. And it's pretty amazing. I don't know if you know the history of telescopes, but the first ones were invented because of the glass that was present to make eyeglasses. So telescopes came from eyeglasses. Where was the best glasses? Where were the best glasses made in the Netherlands? So actually the telescope and the microscope were both invented in Holland.

And the guy who invented the telescope is very interesting because it would be like he made the telescope, but he never thought to look at the at the night sky with it. He only used it as a spyglass to look at objects, you know, on the horizon or in a city or whatever.

He never went like this, looked up in 45. That required Galileo. So he's my absolute hero of all of science. We'll talk about him later maybe. Galileo was the first person to ever look up with this telescope and spot objects in the solar system, in the universe, that had never been seen before with a scientific tool. So everybody had used their eyes, back to Tiko Brahe, Kepler,

Copernicus, they had to use their eyes, which are telescopes. I'll get back to that, don't worry. I know you were forming the podcasters, you know, predilection of going off on long tandys, but I think this is good. Galileo then said, well, I'm going to take this telescope and look at these objects that are otherwise look like stars. And in fact, we're called, you know, basically wanderers because they're the only things that moved. First looked at the moon. Now, take yourself back to 1609 when he was first looking at these objects.

1609, there were no clocks. There were no scientific tools of any real virtue. He, in fact, would invent many of these things. There were simple things like a magnetic compass, a slide rule, which known in your main demographic will notice slide rules, but that's OK. Very simple tools. They would use tubes and whatnot. But Galileo looked at the moon. And the hypothesis was everything in the universe is orbiting around the Earth.

The earth is the most perfect place in the universe because God puts the things that are most important close to him in the center of the universe. God is the center of the universe. The Catholic Church held this and everything would go around the earth. And in fact, I'm not going to challenge you because I think you'll defeat me in this, but in your audience there are probably very many educated, I call them, .edu people. There's many, many educated people. I find that even with my brilliant students at UCSD,

They can't prove that the earth is not the center of the solar system. In other words, I'll say on my astronomy 101 quiz, I'll say prove that the earth is not the center of the solar system, which was the whole universe back then, right?

And I would say it's about 75, 80% will not get it right. In fact, I can say to most people, proof the earth is not flat. I claim the earth is flat. Prove me wrong. Most people can't prove it. They don't know how the proof is constructed. I don't expect them to go and replicate what Aristarchus did 2,000 years ago. But this is knowledge we've had for 2,000 years. The knowledge that the earth goes around the sun and not the other way around is only about 400 years old. But I would say 99%. I know for a fact,

I went to Italy actually 10 years ago. It was the 100th anniversary of Einstein's theory of general relativity. And we had a ceremony to honor the first person who ever came up with a theory of relativity, which is also Galileo. Galileo had the first notion that relative motion is indistinguishable.

that if you and I are on a bike, I'm stationary, you can't tell if you're moving, I can't tell if I'm stationary. That's called relativity of motion. Motion is not absolute. Einstein would later enhance that, you know, put on steroids and then come up with all sorts of cool stuff that we can get into.

But this notion that you could do observations, that you could use a scientific tool, coupled with a hypothesis, and then iterate on those hypotheses to make both the instrument better and your hypothesis better, and then expose that to scientific peer review, which was not what we have today.

That was done by Galileo. He's the first person to use the scientific method. What did he use it with a telescope? So a telescope that he used was a refracting telescope. Lenses like eyeglasses. Two of them, one put at the far end, called the objective. It's closer to the object. The other one, the eyepiece, closer to your eye. And he was able to magnify things about three to 10 times pretty easily.

Can you explain refraction for people that? Yeah. So when light light is the light travels at the fastest speed of any entity, you know, photons travel at roughly 300,000 kilometers per second, except when they go into a medium, that's what they travel it in the vacuum of space or in a vacuum in my laboratory or whatever. But when they go into a medium that's transparent or translucent, they slow down the you can you can think of it as the light waves themselves. Imagine light waves as rows of soldiers marching together.

And then imagine that they're walking an angle to the beach here in Los Angeles. They're marching at an angle. The ones that encounter the water first, they start to slow down. The other ones keep moving at a fast speed. And then the whole beam of light, the whole beam of soldiers gets bent. That process is called refraction. We can do it. Well, this Yerba Maté is so delicious. We can't do it because it's got a little bit of...

Similar to, for instance, if you go and look at a fountain and you see a coin and you decide, you know, you're gonna be that mischievous kid and you're gonna grab that coin. So you can throw it back in, like in any, you can recycle the wish. And you reach down to grab it and you miss because where you see it is not where it actually is. Yes, yeah. Put a pencil in a clear glass of water, same phenomenon will happen. That's refraction. It's the bending of light by what's called a dielectric or just a medium. That's transparent or translucent.

And you can do that in a way that you shape the wave of light coming in that it will be magnified. And that's in fact what a telescope does. Telle means distance, scope means viewer. So a telescope really means distance viewer. A microscope means small thing viewer.

And so this was kind of revolutionary to use it for scientific purposes. Galileo did other things. We just take these for granted. We got all these cool cameras here. These are all refracting telescopes. You can see the lens in one. You can see that it's on a tripod. Galileo invented the tripod. We take these things for granted, but people didn't realize that. What a stud. Yeah, I want to get a list of all the things that the Galileo did. I'm going to pause you for one second, and please earmark where you're at because I have a number of questions that I just can't resist asking.

First of all, if it's too lengthy an answer, feel free to say, you know, pass. But why was the best glass in Holland? What is it about the Dutch and good glass?

I think that they were extremely, as they are now, I have great colleagues that are from the Netherlands. They were obsessed with high quality, as Germans are. They were very similar to Germans, very into very precise instrumentation and high quality. It's interesting to note that the glasses were only really invented in some sense because of the fact that there was an existing standard for human visual acuity.

Okay, so we all know we go to the eyeglasses. Eyeglasses, yeah. So we know today that when you go to the eye doctor, there's an eye chart, right? It's called the Snellin chart. When you go to the DMV, you use the same thing. Numbers and letters of different sizes that at a given distance, if you can read all of them, then you have

whatever, high acute, let's just say high acute division, we won't get into, we won't get into, yeah. And if you can only read, you know, three lines down and then you're essentially blind to the rest, then you have less than average vision. And in the state of California, they'll still give you a driver's license. There are many people by the way, there are many people driving in the United States, by the way, who qualify as legally blind. But because when you drive, you mainly use your peripheral vision, they are granted a driver's license. This should terrify everybody.

But all those I charts, every DMV here, has the exact same size for the E at the top, OK? It's a calibration standard. How could they do that 400 years ago? We're talking 430 years ago. Turns out there was one and only one standard that was acceptable across all of Western Europe. It was the Gutenberg Bible.

The Gutenberg Bible was set in print by Gutenberg and it had a fixed size of all the characters. So what they would do is at a couple of feet, they put the Gutenberg Bible in front of people. It's amazing to think about it because there's only like 10 copies of the Gutenberg Bible still left. They're all in vaults, they're all worth hundreds of millions of dollars. You can't buy them even if you're, you know, Elon.

When you look at it, you would be able to tell that you could not see at one foot what I could not see what Andrew could see at one foot. So you knew that there's something diminishing my visual acuity, whether who knows what it was, but they knew that they could then correct that lens to be as good as 2020 or get up to your standard for me. And that was the way that they would judge how good your eyes were.

And so they then would correct that with lenses. And I always point out how ironic it is, because later on Galileo would take those two lenses instead of putting one on each eye, put one in front of the other one, and then use that to construct a telescope. But he didn't actually invent the telescope, but he perfected the telescope. So just like Apple didn't invent the smartphone,

they perfected it, just like Facebook didn't invent social networking, they perfected it, right? So it's usually the second mouse gets the cheese they like to say. He was the ultimate second mouse. He would always improve things and make them so much better that he would obliterate his competition. But it was Copernicus, if I'm not mistaken, that was the first to say that

The earth revolves around the sun while rotating on its axis. And tilts, which gives us the equinox. Correct, yes. Okay, so Galileo corrected Copernicus about the math, but it was Copernicus that gave us the first, like, trusted statement that the earth and the other planets rotate around the sun. Yeah, I would say he gave the hypothesis. He wasn't wrong. Galileo didn't correct him. Galileo brought evidence to the table. He brought hard scientific oxygen. So he was just a Copernicus guy.

like a iconic class. He was like, hey, how about we're not the center of the universe. It's the Sun, this is the center of universe. So what was the milieu of the time was that the Earth was the center of the universe, which was our solar system effectively was the whole universe. They didn't know about stars and galaxies, certainly. We can get into that later.

But there was what's known as the Ptolemaic concept of the organization of the cosmos. So the earliest cosmological models were that the sun is the center of the Earth is the center of the universe and everything goes around it. However, these were not dopes. They knew that there were problems with that model. There are certain aspects of the orbits of planets, for example.

I mentioned Mercury's retrograde, and what does retrograde mean? We don't have to get into it, but there are anomalies that the planets will undergo at different times of the year due to the fact that the Earth is, we know now, rotating, revolving around the Sun and rotating on its axis, but the main effect is revolution around the Sun.

And the other planets are two in the same plane with the zodiac plane, what's called the ecliptic, due to the angular momentum of the protosolar system. And sometimes the Earth goes faster than, say, Jupiter. So originally, it'll be out in front, if you will, of the planet, you know, forward center of motion, as you'd like to say. And then it'll be behind it later on. And so it looks like the Jupiter is making like this weird S curve. And they couldn't explain that if the Earth is the center of the solar system, except that they added on what are called epicycles.

They added on extra little orbits of the planets in order to account for that motion that sometimes it appears, yes, we're moving bulk motion, but then sometimes it goes in opposite direction when we're going in the same direction. So smart. Yeah, they were smart. And they must have known by modeling this stuff.

on Earth between objects on Earth. And that raises, for me anyway, an important psychological question. So you've got these Dutch folks with great glass. They're using that great glass to correct vision. I should say, sorry, Angel. The reason that they had good glasses, they were some of the foremost

Explorers right a lot of the early trade and they were what did exploration give them access to trade so they could get the finest silicon and glass and they can make it themselves that's their economics again capitalism always wins right this is a lesson we shouldn't forget their commerce their economies allowed them

to do trade and get acquired the best, highest quality materials, then that was used to make the best scientific equipment. And it's just curious that it'd be like, you know, if we, they built these scientific tools, but they didn't use them for science. So imagine like building the large hands around collider or slacker or something like that. And then just not using it, you know, just like using it to like measure. I think Slack is sitting empty, right?

But it wasn't originally, that's the point. Right, it was used for something. So what I'm curious about is, why do you think it is that

some humans get some technology, in this case, glass. And they want to look at things that are very close up. I like microscopes a lot. Right now, I don't have my wet lab. We're still involved in some clinical trials. But I love microscopes, and I loved customizing my microscopes. I didn't like them. Stop. I don't like a plug and play. I like them sort of the same way that people like hot rods. I didn't like motorized stages. I like manual stages, this kind of thing. Nowadays, you need motorized stages, et cetera.

But what was I going to invest my money into? It was higher numerical aperture. Basically, you're able to see things better. Exactly. See smaller things better. That's what numerical aperture will do for you. So it's like putting more horsepower into a car, as opposed to paying more attention to the paint job. People do that with their cameras. Sure. Geek out. Everyone's got their thing.

Humans have this glass and they have the option to look at smaller and smaller things or to resolve their vision. Why do you think it is that a subset of humans? Because I think it's a special subset of humans. Instead, I want to look at things really far away.

And you're one of these humans. I delight in the stars. I delight in the moon. I have some questions about that I think most people have who appreciate sunsets and moon sets and things like that. But why do you think it is that it tends to be a small subset of people who don't just want to appreciate the night sky but want to figure this stuff out that is so far away? I'll be honest.

It never occurred to me. I'm curious about things deep under the ocean. I'm very interested in fishing and aquatic life. But I like terrestrial things, arboreal things, things and trees. And I think most people orient to the stuff that's more of this planet.

What do you think it is? I realize you're not a psychologist and there's probably no DSM, whatever, six diagnosis specific for this. But I'll just ask you, for you, was it a desire to better understand life here on Earth? Or was it a desire to kind of leave life here on Earth?

I think it's a lot. I mean, my childhood was pretty tumultuous. I think you and I have a lot of things in common, both fathers, scientists and physics and math in my case. Very hard driving, very hard to live up to their shadows that they cast, for example, at least in my case. And you seem to have just a beautiful relationship with your dad now, but I'm sure it wasn't always like that. In fact, you talked about

We did a lot of repair work and I'm very grateful for where we're at and I encourage anyone, son, daughter, mother, father, whatever relationship that the repair work to the extent that it's possible is absolutely worth it. And that episode you get out of the text to do is a real gift, not only for all of us who got to witness it, but also for grandchildren, him, his legacy and so forth.

And even, you know, his mom, your dad's wife and your mom. But the point is, yes, it transported me. I was living through, after the divorce of my parents, I lived with my stepfather, who had adopted us, changed our names, moved to different, you know, we were changing, you know, schools every couple of years. And that discovery of the, you know, moon next to Jupiter, it was sort of like solving a puzzle.

And there's a famous saying by, you know, Albert Michelson, who's the first Nobel Prize winner in American history. For what? Physics, sorry. Michelson Morley, he proved in some sense that the Earth is not moving through the ether, you know, that was hypothesized by luminaries beforehand.

But the point was, when a child solves a puzzle, you think, well, like an adult, you solve a Rubik's Cube. OK, I did it once. I don't have to do it again. But my son will keep doing it. He'll keep showing off. Can I get a faster video game? Same thing. Once you solve the video, you don't just throw it out and stop doing it.

you get a taste of that thrill of discovery. Yes, it's diminished. And yes, we become inured to it as we get older and a little bit more, you know, there's just things we have to get, you know, take care of in life. And especially as a professor, scientists, you can't like marvel over the same things you did when you first did these experiments. But as an experiment, you get transported.

And you get to encounter something that you feel like no one has ever done before. For example, when I got my first telescope that night, a couple of months after discovering this, I looked through it and I saw the same features on the moon. And I have a 3D printed moon that my son made to show you. And it has all the craters represented on it, so cool. And I saw the exact same craters on the moon that Galileo saw.

And then I looked at Jupiter. And when they look at Jupiter, you not only see these beautiful atmospheric bands on it, and I brought you a telescope as your end of the year holiday gift. It's yours to keep and no money down. Thank you. And I looked at Jupiter.

And when you look at Jupiter, and as I hope you'll do tonight or with your crew later on, you will see not only the planet, not only its little atmospheric stripes, maybe even the great red spot, which is an amazing three times bigger than the Earth. You can see it from Earth with this little telescope, I got you. But you see four little stars.

And they're four stars that are to the left, to the right. They're in a plane with the midpoint of these equatorial storms that are brewing on Jupiter for four. We know that they've been going on for at least 400 years, because Galileo saw them. So that sets a limit. Minimotans. Storms, when you say storms, what do these storms consist of? They're enormous hurricanes on the planet. And the equatorial bands like the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. So there's plenty of water up there that's raining down? No, it's not water at all. It's methane, ammonia, but it's a fluid. So it behaves like a fluid doesn't. So you have these swirling whirls

colors will amaze you. You'll see colors on an astronomical object. It's going to blow your mind. And not only is it going to blow your mind because you're doing, you're going to feel unique in all of science. You will feel what Galileo felt. You won't know that he felt it before you. A billion people have seen it since then because for you, it's new.

And for you, you're viscerally connected to the maestro, to Galileo, and what he did. And there's no other branch of science that's like that. You can't look at the Higgs boson. First of all, no one person to this team of 3,700 people that discovered the Higgs boson, and seven people predicted the Higgs boson. Higgs is just one of them. One of my professors at Brown was another one, Jer. Ground that he passed away. Unfortunately, he never won the Nobel Prize, but

But the point is, you can't know what that felt like. You can't know what it felt like to discover gravitational waves because thousands of people did it recently in 2015. But the question of visceral connection to the first discover of that phenomena, it's unique to astronomy. I don't know of another branch of science where you can have that. And best of all, from here in the center of LA, you can see the same craters. You can see these four Galilean that are called the Galilean moons of Jupiter.

And we're sending spacecraft there now to see if they have life on it. It's incredible, Andrew. There's nothing else like that in all of science. For $50 to $60, I have a list on my website, briankeating.com. I have a telescope buyer's guide that I send to people. I don't make any money from it. It's just I love to share science with the public, just like you. But in my case, it's astronomy. And for $50 or $75, you can have this experience that Galileo had. It's an awesome feeling.

And I think that's what kept me going. It distracted me from the pains of the life that I had at that time, and just struggling as most pre-teens and teenagers did. But to answer your question that you asked 20 minutes ago, it was really to transport teleport, exactly the opposite of the telescope. I really felt like I was transported to these other worlds.

And that I could understand them with simple math and simple tools. Night after night, there were reliable companions and that people love to see it. You'll see Saturn hopefully with it. You can't help but feel this is, you know, amazing. It's thrilling. And it allows you to do science with your eyes connected to your mind. It's incredible. So it sounds to me like you were, thank you for sharing that, by the way. It sounds like you were able to connect

to places distant in space, obviously, and time. Galileo. That's beautiful. I don't think the same experience occurs when one looks down the microscope. And it's true that the greatest neurobiologist of all time by a long shot was Ramone Kahal.

kind of supernatural levels of ability to understand what turned out to be the correct function of the nervous system, just from anatomical specimens. But when I look down the microscope and I see a, even a cajal retzia cell, there's a cell named after him, you don't really feel a connection.

to him in the same way, although the neurons are beautiful, but it's not the same the way you describe it. What's great about science in general is that the best science is apolitical. But I always say, look, there's no such thing as like, oh, well, that constellation is a democratic constellation.

Oh, see that asteroid, that's a republic, no, it is a safe space. I think we do need safe spaces, and at best science is a safe space, not meaning it never interacts with politics, because of course it does. But for those moments, we as humans and you know this better than I do, we need to recovery. You can't just work out, you don't work out seven days a week, about six days a week, or whatever, but it's still more than...

six more than I work at. But the point is, we need to recover as much as we need to pay attention to the activity. We need to recover or pay attention to that too. And so the question is, where can we recover from social media, from politics, from economic stress?

I think science is an ideal vehicle for it. It should be apolitical. We shouldn't be always concerned with politics or what's happening on social media. And I'm guilty of this too. I'm certainly spending way too much time on screens. But the point being, science can be that. And astronomy in particular, like I said, it's apolitical. It is safe to let your mind run to what you used to do

when you were on a dorm with your bros at, you know, 3 a.m., just BSing, right? We don't get a chance to do that when you're thinking about mortgage payments and like who's taking the kids tomorrow and all these different, you know, quotidian things, I'd say. We need to get back to that more than ever, I feel. Pondering the origins of life and connecting to people who existed thousands of years before us. Do you think that Galileo, Copernicus, and others,

We're doing the exact same thing that there were, there was a bit of an escapism to it, healthy escapism, as opposed to trying to solve the position of the plants and understand ourselves.

for some other reason. Yeah, I mean, Galileo in particular is sort of this tragic figure. In some ways, you know, he had the first notions and application of the scientific method, as I said, using an apparatus to confirm a hypothesis iterating on that. So I said, when he saw the moon, he saw these craters and valleys and riffs and lava fields that you'll see tonight.

Again, people, you can buy a telescope on Amazon, $50, and you'll see the same things that he saw. And you can connect it to your iPhone and post it on Instagram if you want. And I hope you'll do that. That's your only homework assignment. The only one I'm going to assign to you as a professor. So I want you to take a picture of the creators on the moon.

But the point is, you'll see the exact same things. From New York City, you can see them. From the middle of London. It doesn't matter where you are. If you have a clear sky and the moon is that, you'll see the same thing. But when you look at Jupiter, you'll see these four dots. And here's where Galileo just had this otherworldly intellect that when I saw those, I was like, oh, cool, it's next to some stars. Until I realized that I had to do more research that those are actually the moons of Jupiter. So in one night tonight, you can quadruple the number of moons you've ever seen in your life. And some of those moons are almost the size of our moon. Our moon is unusually large.

And those moons, sometimes they'll cast shadows on the planet, so there'll be any clips. You'll witness any clips on Jupiter on another planet with this $50 instrument or whatever, okay? When he was observing these things, he would do things that were not only psychological, and they were therapeutic for him in his later years, I'll explain that in a minute. He ended up going blind, and so losing the sight, you know, and kind of the recollections that he had, and he lost his daughter.

It was a nun because he was, she was illegitimate as most of, I think all of his kids, except maybe one is all this one. He had mistresses. He was never, he was married, divorced, basically. And I was kind of like, he was Catholic in Italy, you know, primordial Italy, basically. It didn't exist as a country, but he was in Tuscany. And he had a lot of challenges. He was almost always broke. Even when he invented his version of the telescope, again, he didn't invent the telescope, but he made it so much better, 10 X to 20 X to, you know, zero to one. And it was incredible what he did with it.

He realized this is great and all for me to discover these cool things and learn about the universe. He was deeply religious, too. But I got to make money. I got to pay for my house. Imagine your students at Stanford are living with you because that's the only way you can afford to pay rent. And you're cooking meals for them. And they're like slobs, right? I mean, I was a slob in college, right? So the point is he had bills to pay, and he was a businessman.

He realized, well, look, if I start making these telescopes, everybody will see the things that I'm seeing. I don't have any monopolistic advantage over Kepler, who is his friend, but also his competitor. They were really vying for who is the best astronomer of all time, Kepler and Germany, and obviously Galileo and Italy will become Italy.

And he realized Kepler was purely theoretical. He had great math chops. He came up with functions for the orbits of planets before Isaac Newton proved that they came from calculus and universal gravitation. Incredible scientists. But if he gave that, it was like giving a free particle accelerator to your arch competitors, right? He didn't do that. He said, no, I'm not going to make these telescopes, but I'm going to sell them only to the government.

And they're going to pay me because these are great military devices. And we don't think of them now. But with it, he went, he's so brilliant. He was so charming and charismatic. He said, I'm not only going to sell you these things. First, he went to the Senate in Venice, the Venetian Senate, the Doge, the original Doge. We think Doge is a coin or some department that Elon's going to have. No, no, the Doge was like the chief of the government back in the Venetians, which is one of the most wealthy countries in all of Europe, who's separate from Tuscany.

and separate from Rome. And he went there and he said, you are in maritime, probably, have you ever been to Venice? It's beautiful, right? So he said, look, come with me, I'm going to take you up into the Piazza San Marco, go up to the tower, and we're going to look out, and we're going to see, there's a ship out there, but you can't see it with your naked eye. But if I give you the telescope, you can see it three days earlier before it comes into your harbor.

That's like you have an F-35 stealth fighter, and you sell the rights to turn off the stealth partner to your address. And it's incredibly valuable. It's a time portal. Yes. You could tell I'm keep harping on this theme of the ability to see things at greater distance. That's right. At higher and higher resolution gives you a window into time. Exactly. And we speak of that now.

has enormous advantage. They're because of the trajectory of the ship. You actually are getting a crystal ball into what's going to happen later. We're looking at a position of the stars.

some anticipation of what's going to happen based on historical charts of the stars. We even speak of that now and come to think of it as you're saying it, light years. What is a light year? It's a measurement of distance, but it's in terms of time. So it's exactly what consonant with what you're saying. We are always going to have this combination, this interrelation, this competition between things in space and things in time. And he realized with this tube that he could see the great distances that also afforded him this extra advantage when it came to predicting the future, as you said.

if we could do a top contour survey of the greats of astronomy.

where would it start? Starting with people who got it wrong. And then correct each other. Like if we were gonna do a fast sprint through these, where would we start? Well, you'd have to start with like, you know, gog or whatever, you know, the first cavemen and women, you know, as I said, to 40 hours. Charting stars on the wall. Exactly. We don't know who they are. Telling their youngsters like, okay, you know, because those stars are there relative to that ridge or et cetera,

days are getting longer, days are getting shorter, ergo, hunt now, ergo, collect stuff to your hunger down. Maybe even don't reproduce now. Maybe even behavioral restraint.

hundred percent. Maybe reproduce now. Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be much more optimal time for exactly. So tens of thousands of pre-entiquity, you would say. Then I would say fast forward to the maybe Egyptian epoch, 5,000 BCE, so to speak, when they had also a very zodiacological and astrological conception of these objects. And yet they would build things in relation to the positions of stars and constellations. Sundial, emergent,

Just sundial obelisks, things that were used, primitive things. Stonehenge also, I think it's like 20,000 years ago. They believe it's related to some astronomical observations. They're not entirely certain about that. We have to double click on Stonehenge. How do you think it got there?

It's one of those great mysteries that's, I think it's less controversial Stonehenge and the Pyramids. The Pyramids seem to be like almost, yeah, they lead people into thinking about aliens. But what do you think of? I mean, given their mass, given their location, given what we knew about populations, and given what we know about the strength of people and the tools they had at the time,

Is it reasonable to assume that people built these things? Certainly. You'd have to convince me that people didn't build them, but exactly how they built it is a great question. For example, I mentioned this when I was on Joe Rogan's show. I said, if you measure

the basis of the pyramids. It turns out that there are a ratio of a qubit, which is actually qubits, not quantum bits like you and your dad talked about, but qubits is the length of the pharaoh's forearm. It's basically a foot and a half roughly. So back then, if you were like the president,

You were also the metric standard for all of civilization. Wild. It's sort of like models on Instagram, right? Everyone's trying to attain these. What's the standard? That's right, exactly. What's the standard? Wild, so the pharaoh's forearm, and is this about carrying items? Yeah, well, is this for length or like a foot?

We talk about foot, it was a pharaoh's foot. That's where we get those from. There was only one rough standard for calibration, which is incredibly important for removing systematic effects in science in general. You had a calibration standard. Now we have a bar of platinum. We've defined the second in terms of oscillations of a certain atom.

called cesium and how many times it oscillates per second. You're a degree, right? Yeah, a calorie, right? So now we want to define those in terms of physical quantities, not in terms of people. And so doing that has been a great advance for it in science. And we've only recently gotten rid of what are called artifacts. So it used to be there was a rod that was one meter long. And the meter was originally defined as 69,000

I forget of the distance from the North Pole to Paris. But that obviously depends on assuming the Earth is a perfect sphere, which it's not, right? It's kind of chubby around the middle. Yeah, it's right. Bulge is because it's an oblate spirit, right? Exactly. And so all these things that were relics, we want to get rid of them and tie them to fundamental properties of, say, a quantum system that's very pure and we can isolate it. We don't want to use a pharaoh's foot either, so we have to come with a link standard.

So now we use the speed of light times the second, and we can define things in those terms. But back then, yeah, so they didn't know that. But I told Joe, as I said, if you measure the base of all the great pyramids at Giza, they're all multiples of a qubit times so many numbers of the number pi.

So, like, the pie wasn't known to them, you know, pies wasn't known to be irrational to the Greeks, and Euclid proved that it was irrational, and that, you know, it didn't come from a computational, it couldn't easily be obtained from, it had infinite number of digits, right? So, how did these Egyptians know that? And Alien told them no.

The way they did it is they laid it out. They used a surveyor's tool. One of the surveyor's tool is a stick with a wheel on it. So the wheel is a circle. So you've got so many multiples, they just counted and that's how. So we confuse a lot of things. They stumbled into pie. Exactly. Right. They walked all over. So you don't have to always posit supernatural explanations for things. The answer is simply, we don't know. I certainly don't know how Stonning was built nor do I know how the pyramids were built. But it's not, you would have to convince me that it was built by some other means other than people and the tools that were available to them.

Yeah, likewise, I'm not convinced it came from extraterrestrial. Yes, I don't know how we got on this. So we were marching through, so we have our ancient ancestors. And then at what point do we get to Copernicus in general life? Yeah, then it was Copernicus who had ideas, but couldn't prove them, had no data to substantiate the Copernican or Sun-centered model of the universe, which is

Also, by the way, almost everything in science is wrong. Copernicus is wrong. The sun is not the center of the solar system, right? The center of our solar system is inside the sun because the planets orbit around it and they orbit around an elliptical pattern, which has two foci. So he believed the orbits were all circles. So he's wrong, but he's more right than Aristotle. So that's why science progresses, right? Newton was right about gravity until he was wrong when Einstein proved them wrong, right?

So then you come up to, after him, Kepler discovered the laws of the elliptical motion of planets and their patterns that we still use. We discovered an exoplanet, my colleague David Kipping on Introduce2. He's discovered exo-moons. These are moons around other planets, some of which are in the habitable zone of their host star. And some of them have sun-like stars and are Earth-sized planets. It's incredible.

There could be, as I said, a link between life evolving on Earth due to the moon on our planet. So too, on an exoplanet, it could require an exomoon, which he's discovered or thinks he has. He's actually very cautious and hasn't said it explicitly. So Kepler's laws underpin all those discoveries, even to this day, 400 years later. Then Galileo, immediately afterwards with the telescope, phases of Venus that only occur if the Earth is not the center of the solar system. The rings of Saturn, he had notions about those.

He accidentally discovered the planet Neptune. It's amazing. And then he, of course, the moons of Jupiter falsified the notion that the Earth is the center of the solar system, because these moons are going around Jupiter, not around the Earth. So that's completely torpedoed the notion of the true nature of the Aristotelian or Ptolemaic Earth-centered cosmology.

Then soon after that, astronomers measured things like the speed of light using eclipses of moons of Jupiter. They measured distances to Saturn. They mapped out the solar system. And then from there, using parallax, you know, you can kind of gauge the triangulation and using trigonometry, measure the structure of our galaxy, William Herschel. And his sister, Caroline Herschel, was the first female astronomer, first female scientist. She was the first person to use the scientific method and become a fellow of the Royal Society.

in Great Britain. And then later off, after that, we come to the era of the last, you know, kind of the big developments in technology were photographic plates after that. Spectrographs, dispersion of light onto photographic material. You could preserve your memory. You didn't use sketches like Galileo did. And then up until Hubble, when Hubble discovered two major things, which was one was that the Milky Way was a galaxy. It wasn't the entire universe. There were other galaxies, island universes of billions of stars.

And then he discovered the expansion of the universe with help from astronomer who doesn't get a lot of attention. A lot of the women in astronomy got really short shrift. People discovered how fusion works in the sun, women got a spotchen at Harvard, and then Henrietta Levitt who measured this relationship between the size and brightness of objects called cepheid variables that Hubble then used to make his law that proved that the universe is expanding.

And then after that, people like Penzies and Wilson discovering the microwave and radio astronomy, Robert Jansky, all the way up until, you know, my colleagues today on some of them have interviewed Adam Reese and Brian Schmidt and Barry Barish, who wrote the forward to my second book, the Tech and Gravitational Waves, the Accelerating Expansion of the Universe due to dark energy, first Nobel Prize in astronomy 2011.

follow-up 2015 discovery of 2017 discovered gravitational waves from inspiring black holes. You know, there's so many and there's so many, yeah, I'd be blessed to know many of them and I have them as my academic, you know, pedigree.

I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, Function. I recently became a Function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing. While I've long been a fan of blood testing, I really wanted to find a more in-depth program for analyzing blood, urine, and saliva to get a full picture of my heart health, my hormone status, my immune system regulation, my metabolic function, my vitamin and mineral status, and other critical areas of my overall health and vitality.

Function not only provides testing of over 100 biomarkers key to physical and mental health, but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from talk doctors on your results. For example, in one of my first tests with function, I learned that I had two high levels of mercury in my blood. This was totally surprising to me. I had no idea prior to taking the test.

Function not only helped me detect this, but offered medical doctor informed insights on how to best reduce those mercury levels, which included limiting my tuna consumption, because I'd been eating a lot of tuna, while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens and supplementing with NAC and acetylcysteine, both of which can support glutathione production and detoxification and worked to reduce my mercury levels.

Comprehensive lab testing like this is so important for health. And while I've been doing it for years, I've always found it to be overly complicated and expensive. I've been so impressed by function, both at the level of ease of use, that is getting the tests done, as well as how comprehensive and how actionable the tests are, that I recently joined their advisory board, and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast. If you'd like to try function, go to functionhealth.com slash Huberman.

Function currently has a wait list of over 250,000 people, but they're offering early access to Huberman lab listeners. Again, that's functionhealth.com slash Huberman to get early access to Function. Today's episode is also brought to us by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs.

I've spoken many times before on this and other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. Now, the mattress you sleep on makes a huge difference in the quality of sleep that you get each night. How soft that mattress is or how firm it is, how breathable it is, all play into your comfort and need to be tailored to your unique sleep needs.

So, if you go to the Helix website, you can take a brief two-minute quiz that asks you questions such as, do you sleep on your back, your side, or your stomach? Do you tend to run hot or cold during the night? Things of that sort. Maybe you know the answers to those questions, maybe you don't. Either way, Helix will match you to the ideal mattress for you. For me, that turned out to be the dust mattress, the USK. I started sleeping on a dust mattress.

three and a half years ago and it's been far and away the best sleep that I've ever had. So much so that when I travel to hotels and Airbnbs, I find I don't sleep as well. I can't wait to get back to my dusk mattress. So if you'd like to try Helix, you can go to helixsleep.com slash Huberman. Take that two minute sleep quiz and Helix will match you to a mattress that's customized for your unique sleep needs. Right now, Helix is giving up to 25% off all mattress orders. Again, that's helixsleep.com slash Huberman to get up to 25% off.

Maybe you can help me here. I've never heard a description of the of the origin of life in the universe That made a lot more sense to me past There were a bunch of big explosions a bunch of the elements and stuff that you needed Yeah came together and then at some point there was water and at some point there were

critters that moved and then multicellular organisms. What am I missing here? I'm a man of science and I love science, but why can't I can grasp it when it's told to me? But why is it that it's so hard, maybe I'm just not smart enough, to comprehend this idea that a bunch of star exploded

dot dot dot and here we are. I think that's obvious why you have this particular affliction and that's because you're used to doing experiment. You're a scientist. Your core identity, one of your core identities is a scientist, right? And you think I think scientifically. And as I said before, the scientific method, as we practice it, is based on hypothesis, observation, experimentation, iteration, right? Well, think about this.

If I study, if I have a hypothesis that, you know, that certain people can, can detect sunspots, right? So I want to have a control group and I want to have a variable, right? So I want to be able to contrast and see if it's statistically significant, right? And I want to p-hack, right? So what do I have to do then? Well, I have to control the number of sunspots.

Okay, sorry, I'm not, you know, you used to say we weren't around at the creation, you know, the design meeting for human beings. I wasn't consulted at the design phase. And by the way, when Brian says p hacking, is people tinkering with the numbers or the experiment or the hypothesis after the data are in in order to try and establish

statistical significance, which, and by the way, p-hacking is not just not good. It's bad. It's cheating of a whole, it's not making up data, but it's tweaking the experimental design in hopes that you'll get something where you probably didn't. It's not good. You don't want to do it. Your colleague at Stanford, Guido, and Ben's won the...

Nobel Prize in economics in 2021. And he's done tremendous amount of work in this, in confounding variables, p-hacking. Where do these things manifest themselves in physics? Well, high temperature superconductors. This goes back to the late 80s. I remember graduating from high school. There was a discovery of room temperature, what's called cold fusion. That was one thing that would create also limitless energy, too cheap to meter from just using hydrogen and from seawater and palladium and platinum.

The turn out to be bogus, and it turned out to be the data were manipulated in such a way that we would say probably fall into the realm of p-hacking, which may not have been maliciously intended, but the goal, the output of it, is certainly a driving incentive that influences people to do things that are unethical. And that happens at all levels. And I saw it in my own experiment.

not necessarily accusing my colleagues of being unethical. We were searching and we still are searching for what caused the Big Bang. We're going to get back to your question of how this comes out because I think I can help. Did that plate still spin? Yeah, it's still spinning like a planet. It's spinning like our solar system, right? But the quarry was so big to unravel what caused the Big Bang to bang? What ignited the spark that became our universe? It was called when we announced the discovery at Harvard

on St. Patrick's Day 2014. World News covered front page everywhere, New York Times, CNN, every single outlet covered it. It was called one of the greatest discoveries of all time. Not only did it explain how our universe came into existence, it also predicted the existence of other universes and what's called the multiverse, which we've heard about maybe in quantum computing.

Most people have heard of it on the Joe Rogan podcast. Yeah, exactly, right. That's right. Among many things that we hear about only on that show. So the point is, it was an a quarry for the ages. And I knew that because that's why I invented the experiment, right? I told you, my father and I, you know, we never really had the reproach month that you and your father seemed to have had. And that's great. We always had kind of a difficult relationship. As I said, he abandoned me in my book. I write about this rather. He abandoned me and my older brother, Kevin. I was seven. He was 10. And he just left us.

Because of that, he didn't end up paying child support for me or my brother and alimony to my mother, and so my stepfather adopted us, and my last name was originally not Keating. It was Axe, A-X. And so when you're adopted, I never saw him. I didn't see him for 15 years. But I knew one thing. He was a brilliant scientist, and he was actually the youngest. He was not only a tenured professor, he was full professor with like a chair at Cornell at age 26.

So you and I got our profession like our 30s or whatever. I was 40 when I got tenure. Yeah. I mean, it's like a much, it seems 26, 26. That was a math. It was a little dare. But I knew he won. Basically, there's no Nobel Prize in mathematics. There's the Fields Medal, which is kind of equivalent at some level, but almost nobody knows about it. It's only given every five years. You have to be under 40, whatever. He never won that, but he won like the prize just beneath that, if you will, called the Cold Prize. And remarkable scientist got into incredible discoveries in mathematics and physics.

And I knew one thing, he never won the Nobel Prize. So as some kids might compete with their father, who's a captain of the high school football team, and they want to be the captain of the college for you, very competitive, boys can be competitive with their dads, right? You know that. And I wanted to compete with him, but he was an athlete. I was an athlete. I can compete with him and do what he could not do, which was win a Nobel Prize. And I was estranged from him. And I was like, I'm going to win a Nobel Prize, and I'll show him, you know, and he'll regret that he

abandoned me and gave me up for adoption. This is my thought, Prague. I'm not saying it's like the most elevated way to be, but that's the way I thought of it. So I said, I have to invent something, discover something. That's worthy of a Nobel Prize. That's all I have to do, quote unquote. How hard can it be? There's been hundreds of Nobel Prizes given out of these people. That's the way you thought about it. I was at Stanford and you're surrounded by a Nobel. You know what it's like. I was a postdoc at Stanford for a short time. Get into that.

And the point was I was obsessed with discovering or inventing an experiment that could take us back to the primordial universe before what we call the Big Bang. The Big Bang is not the origin of time and space. It's the origin of the first elements in the periodic table of the elements. We still don't know what caused that event to occur. And I realized that if we discovered what caused that event to occur,

which is hypothesized to be a phenomenon called inflation, which was co-created by at least three scientists, but two of whom were at Stanford, associate with Stanford, Alan Guth, who's now at MIT. He was a postdoc at Slack, and Andre Linde, who's a renowned professor at Stanford to this day.

So they predicted that there was this mysterious substance called a quantum field, and that the fluctuations in this quantum field existing in the four-dimensional infinite space, the random fluctuations of a quantum field make what's called vacuum energy is unstable.

You can't have what's called vacuum or negative energy and have it just sit there permanently. It eventually, inexorably, must fluctuate and the fluctuations can actually spawn an expansion of that four-dimensional space locally. And that occurred at a specific time. When you say four-dimensional space, can you tell us the axis of that space?

So you can think of as just ordinary three-dimensional space, but imagine x, y, and z extend to infinity in all directions. And we're sitting at our local, what we perceive as the center of our universe. It's just our observable universe. We can look out 90 billion light years in any direction, which is longer than the age of the universe times the speed of light.

That's because the universe has been expanding. In addition to having existed for 14 billion years, it's been expanding for an additional power of three times that. And then imagine time. So time is a fourth component, and we have to weave those together in order to understand how objects behave in this landscape of what we call the cosmos.

But it wasn't limited to just what we now see as our universe. We have a horizon, just like if you go off to the Pacific Ocean here, away from land, you see a horizon. It's a circular horizon in all directions. So we live on a three-dimensional planet, right? The horizon is two-dimensional. It's one-dimensional circle that we can see. Any ship that's above the horizon, we can see visible light coming from it, right?

But we can perceive that there are things on the other side of the planet that we can't see, and we have to learn about those through indirect methods. We can talk about that at a different time. So there's a horizon on a three-dimensional surface, that's a one-dimensional surface. In four dimensions, it's a two-dimensional surface.

So you kind of lose two dimensions. And that means it's a sphere. Our universe looks like a sphere centered on us. We look in all directions. We see constellations. We see galaxies. We see clusters of galaxies. And you go farther than off back, you see this primordial heat that's left over from the formation of the elements.

That's called the cosmic microwave background radiation. That's what I study. It's properties. And what it reveals is the oldest light in the universe. The oldest possible light was once visible. You could see it if you existed, but nobody existed back then. And it originates from the formation of the lightest elements and the lightest atoms on the periodic table.

So you could look back and if you could see this you would see a pattern imprinted on that light called gravitational radiation or waves of gravity and that would be evidence of something beyond the visible horizon and that would actually originate from this inflationary epoch if it occurred.

So I had the idea to build the first telescope, a refracting telescope of all things, just a telescope with lenses, but lenses that are transparent to microwaves and focus microwaves. But I realized I could build that telescope. And if we were successful, I didn't think we wasn't guaranteed to be successful, but it was a big enough scientific quest.

that it was guaranteed to win a Nobel Prize if we were correct. And in fact, spoiler alert, my first book is called Losing the Nobel Prize because we had a retracted discovery that we made at Harvard on St. Patrick's Day 2014, 10 years ago. So you had a paper that essentially led you to the

realistic possibility that you might win the Nobel Prize. And then you had to retract it. Do you recall your state of emotional state or state of mind when you realized that you were wrong? Very clear. And that's how it relates to this p-hacking and everything else. We actually didn't have this paper peer review.

We were so concerned that a competitor, which is a spacecraft, a billion-dollar spacecraft, we were just a $10 million experiment, a little telescope at the South Pole Antarctica, where I've been a couple of times. And that instrument bested a scientific telescope led by 1,000 people, costing $1 billion led out of multiple countries in America and Europe. And we were terrified, as many scientists are, that we're going to get scooped. In fact, the original discovery of the cosmic microwave background was made by accident.

the discovery of this three Kelvin heat source that's coming to us in all directions, i.e. it's a background, was made by accident at Bell Laboratories, and Bell Labs accidentally discovered it because they were looking at the very first communication satellites, you know, AT&T Bell Labs of communications. So they stumbled on it.

They accidentally said, I'm looking at the satellite that should have a certain amount of background, hiss, noise, whatever that was expected, but I'm getting hundreds of times that amount. And where could that be coming from? They did very excruciating, very high precision measurements. And they found they couldn't identify a single terrestrial source or a cosmic source of any other sort, except for the fact

that if the universe began, essentially with a big bang, they didn't call it that back then, that there would be a pervasive heat left over that would be exactly this temperature, three degrees above absolute zero, three degrees Kelvin.

So I knew if they want a Nobel Prize, certainly I'd win a Nobel Prize for discovering why that effect happened, right? It's like you discover, you know, some amino acid and then you discover, well, it's produced by DNA. Well, certainly you know if the amino acid won the Nobel Prize, certainly DNA would win the Nobel Prize. Well, heads are idea. Arthur Kornberg, RNA, son, you know, structure of RNA. Yeah. So you published a paper that wasn't peer reviewed. Correct. Because you were worried about getting scooped. Scooped is when someone else beats you to publication, folks.

and gets credit for the discovery. It's a whole discussion that we could have some other time if we just want to riff on the process of science. So you published the paper. We didn't publish it. We submitted it to the archive. We had a press conference at Harvard Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences. And it was televised. And the audience were Nobel laureates and reporters. But the discovery that was clear that we would have won it.

However, at that time, I had been removed from the leadership of the experiment that I created. So I created the predecessor experiment. You know, it's like iPhones. You build one, then you upgrade it. You build a better camera. So the first one I invented when I was a postdoc at Stanford, it was called Bicep.

and it stood for background, imager of cosmic, extra galactic polarization. And it's also kind of a play on words because the pattern of microwave polarization, which we can talk about, was a twisting curling pattern. So I made the pond like a curl like you do bicep, the muscle behind curls. Anyway, it's not that funny. And they ended up trying to change the acronym, which pissed me off. But anyway, the tragic thing is that we built this experiment, we upgraded this experiment,

It's very hard to get money to build it. I got money from David Baltimore, who's the president of Caltech. I should say, I was at Stanford. I should say about David Baltimore just because people might want to go to former president of Caltech. Maybe still? Rockefeller. No, he's former president of the Rockefeller. That's an interesting story.

If you want to look it up, you know, look it up as they say. Scientists are human. He landed at Caltech. So they funded you to do this. He gave me a special grant, just presidential, called Caltech President's Fund. He gave it to me and my postdoc advisor, Andrew Lang, is an incredible scientist. He was married to Francis Arnold, won the Nobel Prize in 2018.

in chemistry, a renowned scientist as well. And they were just a power couple. And he invited me to give a talk and I gave a job talk. He hired me on the spot. I couldn't help myself from saying yes before he finished this. I was miserable at Stanford, by the way. It was 1999, 2000.com boom. I was making $32,000 a year living on Alma Street. The Cal trains were running every 17 minutes. I know because I was awake from 5 a.m. I couldn't sleep more than four or four or five hours.

And I just said, yes, move down to Caltech. And because of that, I convinced him and my colleague, Jamie Bach, who's currently a professor, to build this telescope and put it at the South Pole in Antarctica. And that was the only place we could do it. And the only university I would fund it was this gift from David Baltimore's presidential fund. So these confluence of events. And by the way, then, because I got this job and because I built this telescope with my colleagues, I got the job at UCSD, which then enabled me to

My wife. So let me, an incredible story. You move down to Caltech, which is in Pasadena. Amazing place. And then you get the money. How much was this? The initial one was a million dollars to build the first version. Okay. That's quite a gift for a postdoc, a million bucks. You decide the South Pole will be the place to do it. We can talk about why that is. And then you make this discovery, which turns out to be false. Yeah.

So, but it sounds like you have good feelings about the experience on the left. So because I was recognized and this experiment got a lot of attention because it was the really the first one ever designed to look for the spark that ignited the whole Big Bang. So it became, you know, just the cause-syllabra of the cosmology field.

And are you thinking at this point, forgive me for playing therapist here? I'm not one. I'm not pretending to. No, it's fine. Were you thinking at this point, okay, you know, this challenge that I think not all but a lot of sons have with their, with their fathers, not necessarily to best to them, but one evaluates themselves relative to like their family lineage. Sometimes it's a grandfather, you know, that this thing of having some

Internal friction in order to live up to something. Yeah sounds like that was driving it when you make a tiger was an understand for right Same story, but father hard pushing driving and then what does he do after he you know as a PGA champion? He wants to like become a Navy SEAL or something like

He was hanging out with a lot of seal tanks. It wasn't enough for him. Sorry, I interrupted your question. At the point where you made this discovery where you film like, all right, check that box. What was kind of revelatory to me is that sometimes you start a quest or you start a journey and the fuel that gets you going, it's no longer serves you when you get there. My brother always says, baggage has handles so you can put it down.

Nice. So that, like, journey from initiating it, the experiment, to best my dad, to show him up, to make him regret that he abandoned me and my brother. I mean, I always said, I could see a good band in me. I was only seven, kind of boring. You know, he used to joke, I only care about kids once they learn calculus, so he was, you know, kind of funny. What a cruel thing to say. He would say it in jest, and it is true we did reunite, and we did have a reproach month, but it was after inventing this experiment, after I arrived at Caltech,

It was. I mean, he was this kind of intellect, and it was so lovely to see you and your dad. You know, my wish for you is to have kind of an experience, maybe similar, maybe not, but when you do have kids and please God you will.

Um, you get to, you get a do over it. You get to kind of correct the mistakes or the ways that you, and you'll never get it right. You know, one of my friends, a psychiatrist, he says, your job as a parent is to only pass on half of your neuroticism to your kids. And if every generation does that, you know, it'll eventually be a perfect species. But, um, but I, but I felt that passion and so forth to kind of best him. And then when we reunited and, and

It no longer, as I said, it no longer served me. But the trajectory that I had launched this experiment on continued unabated. And so that had this inertia, this momentum that couldn't be stopped. In fact, so many people wanted a part of it. And so much pressure was surrounding it that I think partially that led to me actually being kind of kicked out of the leadership of the experiment. And that was precipitated by a truly tragic event. So I told you,

My advisor Sarah Church set up a job interview for me with her advisor when she was a post-duck at Caltech named Andrew Lang.

Andrew was like a sort at that time I was a stranger. He was like a father figure. He was like, you know, like, ever see the TV show, Mad Men like Don Draper, he's just like handsome, good looking. Everyone thought he was going to win a Nobel Prize. He was stolen from Berkeley. They spent tons of money to recruit him from, you know, from Berkeley to come to Caltech. He only can't, you know, his wife was a power couple, Francis Arnold, again, what she won the Nobel Prize a few years ago.

and he just had the world at his fingertips charming funny and and he would say things like you know Brian this is so unrealistic that we have to do it like he was a kid he loved to play and he loved he's the one who inspired me in this in this way of just

Never stopping like that passionate curiosity and the reward that you get I always say, you know When you solve a problem your reward is a harder problem like that's but that if you're a scientist that feels good because it's like I always say and I think it's one of your colleagues I'm not sure so much good stuff and going on up there, but

But there's a concept of finite games and infinite games, right? So I would say science is an infinite game. You can't win science. It goes on forever. No one's masters all of whatever science is. You can debate even what it is. But it's composed of an infinite number of finite games.

getting into college, getting into graduate school, getting a postdoc, getting a tenure track position. Those are all finite games, right? And the ultimate, what's the ultimate finite game? A Nobel Prize. There's only three people can win each year. There's only 200 people have ever won it. There's more people in the NBA than have won it in physics, right? So this is a very exclusive club. And if you win it, somebody else isn't going to win it. Odds are.

And this pressure to kind of get to that level should never exceed the passion that drove you to become a scientist in the first place. And so I was obsessed with that. And what Andrew Lang showed me is that science is its own reward. And the pleasure of finding things out, as you know, Feynman would say, is its reward? Science is its own reward. And that's characteristic of these infinite games. You just want to keep playing them. And the tragic thing

is that I am emotional thinking about this. When Andrew was at the peak of his life, he chose to take it. He took his own life. He killed himself. He killed himself. Ironically, tragically, he used helium, which is central to the formation of the universe. And the creation of our universe is reliant on the large part on helium.

And he is fixated himself in a cheap, dirty, sleazy motel. Actually, I'd stayed at Pasadena when I was visiting him for my initial job talk. Do you mind if we go into this event? Yeah. I realize it's a painful memory and I feel it, you know, not to shift the focus. But ironically, all three of my academic advisors, dead first one, shot himself in a bathtub two weeks after we celebrated something for him. Just like, like, you know, suicide is such a peculiar thing.

He did it for very different reasons, different stage of life. Let's get back to Lang. How old was he? He's 41, I think. So he's young. He had three kids. Three kids. His wife's still alive. Yeah, Francis is still a renowned professor. Which she shocked.

They were separated. They had begun in a strange and they weren't living together. It was interesting. He was always very close. She had two children, I think, from a previous marriage or one child from a previous marriage. And he was like a father to that son as well, like a biological father, whatever that means. Kids were so dedicated to him. And look, don't cry for me. I mean, I still emotional because he meant so much to me as a mentor, as a friend, as an advisor.

as a father figure basically, but he had real kids and he had adopted kids. It was tragic for everyone. Suicide is such a peculiar thing because in some sense it can quote-unquote make sense for if somebody we know is very depressed or they have a terminal illness.

But it sounds like it came as a bit of a surprise. Do you think that sometimes there's this close relationship between genius and, let's just say, not mentally healthy, that even what you mentioned before, we have to try this experiment. I mean, there's a bit of a recklessness to that. When you're dealing with millions and millions of dollars in post-doc careers, I mean, the delight of a fun experiment and an adventurous experiment, maybe as a

like a project where you kind of wade into it a little bit to see, but that's very different than like, we have to do this. And there's a risk-taking element there that supersedes kind of my notions of like,

what an advisor's job is, which is to make sure that people progress toward, or sure, discovery, but also like, you want some, one of the most important thing to mentoring scientists is that they have some sense that there is a future for them. Yeah. And you can't guarantee it, but you'd like to, like a parent would for a child. You want, you want to give them some sense that like the sun's going to come up tomorrow. That's right. We're not going to implode or explode here.

And he was a pragmatist. He would give me advice, life advice. And again, I was estranged from my father. He was playing this role. And he was just so charming, handsome, charismatic. He had just discovered, came off this discovery of proving that the universe has a flat spatial geometry, which just means that any triangle that you make in the universe, whether it's three planets, three stars, three galaxies, three patches of the cosmic microwave background radiation,

always the interior angles add up to 180 degrees as they do on a flat table here as they did for Euclid and that had astonishing implications for how the universe might have begun and it's still true and this is still true it's more true than ever so do you think that perhaps I mean who knows

perhaps he committed suicide because he was at a peak. One of the things that people talk about is the peak and trough of dopamine. You mentioned infinite games. I've said many times before that it's very important that you not get fast, large amplitude increases in dopamine that are not preceded by effort. Methamphetamine will give you a large amplitude, a fast increase in dopamine, but there's zero effort involved except to procure it.

And it syncs you into a post-Dopaminergic peak trough afterwards that will have you hanging on for the will to live. So what comes up goes down and it often goes down further than it went up when we're talking about dopamine. Playing an infinite game is great because it's in the motivation for answers. It sounds like he hit a peak and you

Wonder if maybe he's like, okay, now I'm gonna check out now. It's gonna be hard to keep doing this. I don't think it's explicable. I don't think I mean the human brain is the most complicated thing and you know that human brains can even contemplate, right? It's the solipsistic in a sense, but

I couldn't really wait into it. I mean, I know details of his personal life and yes, divorce and separation and so forth. But I don't think that's it, just because the highs of the new quest and the dopamine hadn't really come in from Bicep and it wouldn't come in for four more years after his death in 2010. So you got to continue the project? We got to continue the project. But because he was removed and he was kind of my constingly area, whatever,

I was to him, I forget how the relationship goes. I'm not as conversant with the mafia as I should be. But with Andrew, with his death, one of the trivial and comparison consequences was that the main patron and backer of me and my career, who helped me get my job at UCSD, had helped me get this presidential career grant, which I received from President Bush and all these incredible accomplishments. It's just been my sounding board on experiments and kept me going and helped me when I had

troubles with my graduate students, and he would talk to my, I mean, it's unheard of, right? The compassion that this man had. And if he had only reached out to me, you know, I'm sure he had better friends than me, but like, I would have gone up in a second. You know, I went to the motel where he took his life when I was writing my book just to put me back in

Like try how can I comprehend it? I couldn't I just cried I sat in front of the hotel and I cried but but no I don't think we're gonna understand it But but the eventual high wouldn't come and then a much more crashing low after we essentially had to retract it and we're Disconfirmed as they say so you continued with the project. Yeah

I was at UCSD and I left Caltech. You get your job, you got this telescope down at the South Pole. How do you get to the South Pole? You fly to Chile and then you ride a bicycle there? I never had the physique to get into the military, although I wanted to be a pilot, actually. I wanted to go to the Air Force Academy like my stepfather did. But I didn't have the... I didn't have the HLP diet back then.

But the point was you go on a military, it's a whole way. And you do it in seven days, eight days. If you're lucky, sometimes you can take three weeks due to the weather down there. It's the most violent weather, most winds, turbulence, everything, you know, hostile. But that's a cakewalk compared to the Explorer Shackleton.

or a Scot and, of course, Amundsen. So the quest to get to the South Pole first, which is South Pole, I should say, for people that aren't familiar, Antarctica, because the seventh continent is the last one to be discovered. It was only really discovered. It was thought to be there because it was thought that to balance the continents in the Northern Hemisphere, you needed a massive counterweight in the South, it's so stupid. But anyway, it wasn't discovered until...

1900s, really, that they truly existed. And then it wasn't explored until 10 or 12 years later. And the quest to get to the South Pole, it was the last unexplored, you know, non-filled in part of the map of the earth. So the quest to get there was like going to the moon. And in fact, it exactly parallels the moon in that once it was reached for the first time, nobody cared to go back again, you know, for many, many years. And we're only going back to the moon now 60 years later, 50 years later.

after the Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 missions. So getting there and setting that bar and making that accomplishment, sometimes that's the extent of it. When you have the dopamine hit of being the first to get somewhere, Scott was a British scientist and an explorer.

And Amundsen was just an explorer. Amundsen, rolled Amundsen, he tried to get to the North Pole first. He lost. Somebody else beat him. And he said, well, I'm going to keep going with his skis and sled dog team that I have. And he literally went to the South Pole, 180 degrees round. So the poles are the two endpoints of the Earth's axis of rotation. There's a North Pole.

There's no land there. There's no continent there. There's ice there and Santa is there exactly, right? And then the South Pole is a continent. If you go, I brought a piece of it here that I collected, probably illegally from Antarctica, I'll show it to you later. It's just rocks, right? So if you drill under the ice in Antarctica, you come to a continent. That's the difference between the North and South Poles. But the South Pole is 700 nautical miles from the coast of Antarctica. The closest point of approach in the 1900s was you take a ship from New Zealand,

You sail to south in another way to go and you come to the continental shelf, the coastlines called McMurdo Station, which was just, you know, basically there's some sea lines there and that's it and orcas and penguins and nothing else. At that time, now there's a whole research station. And then they got on skis and skied up 9,000 feet from sea level to 9,000 feet where the polar plateau flattens out.

and they got to the South Pole. And Amundsen got there three weeks before Scott. And Scott was this British naturalist, like a Darwin, but also he was a scientist plus an explorer. So he wanted to collect samples, and he found flora and fauna. There's not much rocks, meteorites. He actually discovered meteorites in Antarctica. Incredible scientist. But because he was a scientist, it cost him his life.

Because he was carrying all this scientific equipment and scientific samples, and he had to ski up them, like he would find it. And he's like, I'm not coming back the same way they got there because of the wind patterns. So he knew he'd never come back. So he couldn't leave it there. So he had to carry extra food, fuel, and men dedicated to it. Oh, and by the way, the Norwegian team, Amundsen, was Norwegian.

And they use sled dogs for two reasons. One, they conserve calories. They provided propulsion. And then they provided a tasty snack once you got to the South Pole. Because once you get to South Pole, you can ski downhill 9,000 feet to sea level, basically. And so they ate, British would refuse to do that. So they knew they couldn't eat their dogs. And they had dogs, but they wouldn't eat them. So they were the sled dogs. And when they got to the South Pole,

They came within three or four kilometers, and it's totally flat like this table. The South Pole looks like this, go out in the middle of the ocean, freeze it, paint it white, and that's what it looks like. It's white hundred, you know, 360 degrees around, okay? It's the most boring place on Earth, literally, and I've been there. He got within, so you can see things really far away. He got there, he got within three kilometers, and he saw something on the horizon, and he's like, oh, you know, bleep, right? And it was a Norwegian flag.

Now, can you imagine Neil Armstrong steps out of the eagle and he lands on a Soviet flag? I mean, it would be like the most crushing, it was the most, I think, the most depressing moment in human history to come so far. And he actually said, they said, great God, this is a horrible place. And all the more so for having reached it without the benefit of priority.

So the king and queen, they were depending on him to make the first king in country, right? Seeing the Norwegian flag. So what did he do? He was a good scientist. He said, maybe they made a mistake. Maybe they're off by 10 feet. I can sit down. All right. The Norwegian's got there first.

And because he got there three weeks later in the middle of January, by the time he turned around, the winds had died down. They were no longer at his back. He was skiing. He had no food. He died about three weeks later or three months later in March. So his body was later recovered and it was, you know, it wasn't reported back to England for another six months. So they gave their lives for science, for discovery, and to come up short to be second, it must have been the most crushing defeat in history.

But it happens to be the best place to do astronomy in the world. And you get there by flying to Santiago, Chile? No, first you go to Christchurch, New Zealand, you go to Auckland, LAX, Auckland, Auckland to Christchurch. And then the US has a charter with the New Zealand Air Force. And we give them C-130 cargo planes, or we have our own C-17 cargo planes, the jet powered ones. Unfortunately, I got the C-130s, which is a four prop plane.

And I was on a plane that had the entire winter, summer supply, sorry, the entire winter supply of bananas on this cargo plane, which is as big as room, the cargo hold, you know, 12 by 12 or, you know, times 50 feet long.

And it was filled with bananas. And at first, you're like, oh, cool. This is great. Until you realize there's no bathroom on the plane, there's just literally a five-gallon bucket and a shower curtain. There are no windows on it, because why do paratroopers need windows? And then there's enormous crates of bananas. There's 12 tons of bananas. I have not touched a banana in 12 years because of that.

I'm not missing potassium or whatever. But the point is, you land on the coast, and then if you're lucky, you take a flight the next day, and it's a ski plane. It's the only plane that the US does not export. In other words, we export the F-35. This is a strategic asset that we've not actually had. Well, it's hard to get to. It's very difficult. So why South Pole? And does this take us into the realm of light pollution? Right. I mean, when I look up at the Starry Night here in Los Angeles, even though I'm talking

sort of back towards the eastern hills. I don't live at the coast. I can see some pretty impressive stars. Not as impressive as when I highly recommend people get up to the Yosemite High Country in the month of August. You can catch some great meteor showers. It's an amazing place to begin with. You have the meteor showers and you're transported to another place.

There's a lot of light pollution from cities. Yeah. And it travels very, very far. So I'm guessing you're down in the South Pole because there's less light pollution. You're right. A slight deviation from that is it's not light that we're looking for. We're not looking for optical light. We're looking for heat. So it's heat pollution. You're exactly right. We're looking to avoid heat pollution. So we want to be summer cold. We want to be summer that's far away from, you know, man-made sources of RF interference and microwave interference and communications, obviously.

But the South Pole has a couple of other properties. One, the sun is below the horizon. And the sun is 5,500 Kelvin. And we're looking for something that's a fraction of a Kelvin, maybe a few milli or nano Kelvin at most. So it's billions of times that we want to get avoid. Even the Earth itself is still 300, almost 300 Kelvin down there. Freezing is 273. So it does have that property. But the best part about it, it's above a lot of the Earth's atmosphere, because at 9,000 feet above sea level,

And it's so cold, you don't know this because you're a California baby, but on the east coast, when I would grow up, some days, the bane of my existence would be you'd listen on the radio and they'd announce school closures due to snowfall in the winter. And sometimes they'd say, oh, you're out of luck because it's too cold to snow. Sometimes the air temperature cannot saturate and perform precipitation, and the south poles like that. It's so cold that if you took this glass, I'm holding a glass here,