Losing the Nobel Prize: Cosmology and Ambition

good evening everyone my name is Andrew frack Noi I'm the emeritus chair of the astronomy department here at Foothill College in Silicon Valley and it's my great pleasure to welcome everyone here in the Smithwick auditorium and everyone watching us on the web to this lecture in the nineteenth year of the Silicon Valley astronomy lecture series this program is co-sponsored by the Foothill College science and math division by NASA's Ames Research Center by the SETI or search for extraterrestrial intelligence Institute and by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific all of them organizations which are devoted to the public understanding of science tonight's speaker is dr. Brian Keating of the University of California at San Diego dr. Keating is a cosmologists and the principal investigator of the Simons Observatory collaboration in Chile he's the author of more than 100 scientific publications and two US patents he was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford and Caltech and received a 2007 presidential Early Career Award for scientists and engineers for his role in inventing the bicep telescope which I'll tell you a lot more about tonight dr. Keating is a commercial pilot with multi engine instrument ratings and is a trustee of the San Diego Air and Space Museum but he's here tonight because he is the author of a popular book called losing the Nobel Prize and he will be signing copies of that book in room 1401 after the lecture and the questions are over I wanted to mention that just recently losing the Nobel Prize was selected by Amazon as one of the top science books of 2018 so he's going to talk a lot about the pressures of the Nobel Prize and the amazing work they were doing at the South Pole me now introduce to you dr. Bryan Keating when you think of the most important astronomical phenomenon what comes to mind a black hole a wormhole some other kind of hole well let me tell you tonight we're gonna talk about what I consider to be the most important substance in the universe and it's nothing more than what follows around most of our children which is dust except I'm going to explain to you how dust played such a phenomenal role throughout cosmic history astronomical history including some of the biggest discoveries ever made and some of the undoing of something some of the seemingly biggest discoveries ever made including one that I was intimately involved with as I'll describe I'll explain how dust destroys things such as Nobel Prizes but it also creates things such as planets and even creates the hemoglobin that's flowing through your veins right now and I'll explain the cosmic web that connects all these things together but as Andy mentioned I'd like to thank Andy and Foothill and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and the SETI Institute NASA Ames and my mother and father for having me know there's so many thing people i'd like to thank-- it's so nice to be here back in the Bay Area and I and I commend you all for braving through a cloud of dust on your way to get here now I when I was a kid and I used to read books by Isaac Asimov and and other science authors science fiction authors I used to always get dismayed by the dust jacket I used to hate dust jackets this is what happens to dust jackets so I get a stack of books delivered to me as a first-time author and as soon as I get them I open them up in the dust jackets fall off and the book comes out and they curl up wrinkled up and I used to think well this is kind of unusual why do we have dust jackets and then I realized something really interesting because you think about things like black holes and wormholes and and gravitational lenses and all sorts of things when you think about astronomical objects but there's a reason that books come with a dust jacket and not a wormhole jacket okay because dust is much more ubiquitous it's much more commonplace and it actually plays a vitally important role in our lives so although I don't like dust jackets very much they did a nice job on the dust jacket that I'll be presenting after the after the talk tonight so I'm gonna talk a lot about the Nobel Prize before I get to the Nobel Prize I want to explain the scientific project that I was involved with at the bottom of the world in Antarctica and this project set its sights on the very cosmic prologue itself namely the conditions under which the universe is BIGBANG unfolded which remains shrouded in mystery until this very day I want to explain why that's so important and I want to motivate the searches that we undertook in part motivated at least speaking for myself only motivated by an award created about a hundred and twenty-five years ago by none other than Alfred Nobel and Alfred Nobel did something amazing with his will he revitalized the Nobel named which for generations had been associated with basically armed dealerships that they were the foremost creators of military explosives which they sold around the world to the highest bidder in fact when Alfred Nobel's older brother Ludwig died in 1888 there was a newspaper article headline in the Parisian newspaper where Alfred Nobel was living and it said the merchant of death Alfred Nobel is dead the man who single-handedly caused the deaths of more people than any other man in human history has met his just reward or something like that now obviously he's reading that so it can't be him right so it's like Mark Twain the reports of his demise were slightly exaggerated in this case though it did something for Alfred Nobel that was essentially the same phenomenon that happened to Ebenezer Scrooge which is which is that he got a taste of what the world really thought about him and what they would say about him after he died while he was still alive and he set out in 1888 he wrote down his will a few years later and he decided to take essentially all of his war profits the profits that he and his family had accrued for making things the most profitable of which was dynamite using that that vast fortune to make the world better through a series of prizes that he endowed that bear his name and I'll talk a lot about that and how that sort of was very fortuitously time and actually his will was written in in the in November of 1895 and he died a year later and there's a saying that you should always do penitence the day before you die right of course you don't know when you're gonna die but he got pretty close he got he got within a year of his death and he actually endowed this this this will that launched this vast public relations coup in a sense that I claim is really the most famous will ever written and what impelled me on the quest that I'm gonna describe tonight is in part the desire to win this 24 karat gold medallion cash value 24 thousand dollars and and as I was a young cosmologists when I came up with an idea that I was assure I was assured by many people if it were successful would result in my having one of these to hang around my neck I'm gonna describe that quest and the project that I hope would bring me to went to Stockholm to win this award and how it was essentially lost hence one of the meanings of the book's title losing the Nobel Prize it's not a how-to guide okay I don't want anyone out here who's about to win the Nobel Prize you know to use it as a as a how-to guide to lose but I like to say that you know most people don't get to the promised land whatever that may be for yourself right you don't get to be President or governor or whatever you don't even get to be you know a high school class president for some of the young people so how do you deal with setbacks with adversity and how do you resolve to make improvements both for the benefit of yourself and your own career and the people around you but maybe for the world as well and that really is the catechism of the Nobel Prize for the betterment of world of mankind but I want to start with the first astronomical telescope wielded by Galileo Galilei himself this was a lever that really was a short short lever in a sense Archimedean sense but as it's saying goes given a long enough lever you could move the world well this tiny telescope barely longer than an arm stretched at arm's length was enough to displace the world the entire planet from the centrality that it had enjoyed for millennia before Galileo's observations in 1609 and 1610 this is what he saw and he sketched it so beautifully in Siderius nuncius starry messenger and actually got my hands on a copy of this not too long ago courtesy of my friend Jay Paz a cop who's I'm sure familiar to many of you he wrote the book the field guide to the stars and planets which is the very first astronomical text or field God that I ever read as a 13-year home and so it shows in that book in that masterful book Galileo's talent at data science the science that many of you in this valley made of silicon practice which is to express findings that are quantitative in sometimes a qualitative form and in doing so make an argument in Galileo's case a scientific argument through pictures and through simple words descriptions and mathematics that was enough as I say to displace an entire planet from being the center of the universe but Galileo like Einstein was also not you know he was mortal he was not free from making errors and one of his errors which I considered to be his biggest blunder I'm alone in this assumption by the way many other people claim that his biggest blunder was actually his theory of the tides which I discuss in my book but I won't get into that now but many of you may recognize this tiny asterism you can see it tonight through the haze through the smoke through the dust and it's the Pleiades or the Seven Sisters and you may if you speak Japanese refer to it as Subaru which essentially means the same thing and you know that it's called the Seven Sisters but you don't to be very good at math to count up six stars there so know the guys at Subaru and and gals did not make a mistake they're actually only six stars that you can see with the naked eye but with a telescope even a tiny one even a 2-inch diameter refracting telescope that Galileo used did not invent but used improved and made great advances with Galileo was able to reveal the Pleiades in a way that had never been seen before he saw countless stars not just the seven stars that you could potentially see on a good night with perfect vision and no alcohol in your system or the six stars that most of us can see if we're fortunate to have a relatively good vision but he saw basically an uncountable retinue of stars and he sketched it here and what Edward Tufte has called Tufte is called the first and best example of data science in human history which was to make an argument a scientific argument by way of a depiction a graphic so Galileo was an artist in the Pleiades like all artists have their muses Galileo's muses were the Pleiades the nurse nymphs of dionysos the God of the grape and when he sketched it he sketched these filled in stars here when these open stars and the difference was the filled in stars were stars that he could only see with the aid of the telescope or as he calls it a spyglass and he says down here what was observed is the nature of the matter of the Milky Way itself the galaxy itself which the spyglass reveals so well that the disputes that for so many generations have vexed philosophers are destroyed by visible certainty and we are liberated from there the philosophers wordy arguments I love this because it shows a physicist making fun of a philosopher okay we all do that we all a physicist would like to make fun of philosophers but he's also making an argument that by visualizing something you could prove a scientific conjecture which was that the the glowing mysterious glow that surrounds the Pleiades was actually comprised of stars that his telescope could not resolve but it could if he had access to a bigger telescope which he never actually made and so he never actually verified that is that his conjecture was false and therefore was a blunder because if you have access to the Lick Observatory you know if you happen to have one of those nearby you can go out and you can take an image a long exposure with a much bigger optic and you can never resolve the glow that's here into individual stars so blunder but in the same sense he was making the argument that this glowing nebulosity was representative in just the same way that the earth was a mere planet that the stars in the in the night sky and the Sun itself was just a mere miniscule element to the vast cosmos at large he was making a scientific argument and he said by visible certainty you essentially proof by visualization and we have another name for that now if you zoom in on the nebula here you can never resolve it into individual stars in fact what it resolves into is what's called a reflection nebula this m/45 for all my astronomer friends out in the audience m/45 has beautiful glow that suffuses it that under any amount of magnification remains this diffuse glow in fact if you have a Hubble telescope at your disposal you'll see these knots here and these knots the nebula is actually tiny mirrors that reflect the light from the star this is Merapi and reflected light has the exact same spectral chemical fingerprint as the star itself therefore these elements are reflecting the light they're not individual stars that's dust and that's what the nebula is primarily comprised of and some of these knots of dust are not so different from what our primordial solar system must have looked like from afar in that it was comprised of gas and dust and there were stars that were illuminating it not too far away and perhaps the Sun had a companion perhaps it didn't but that star light reflecting off of the nebular dust is what confused Galileo into making Brian Keating's opinion his biggest blunder now he still was renowned for making some not insignificant discoveries in his career despite that vast blunder I'd be happy if I made a blunder like that by the way with the telescope he displaced the earth from being here to being here a movement of 93 million miles right but at the same time a complete revolution and Ira idea for humankind that we weren't the center of the solar system and the solar system and the stars are basically in the entire universe they didn't know yet about stars and other galaxies as that would come about a hundred years later after Galileo's time nevertheless he enjoyed some success so the first bit of success he had made him very enviable among professors such as myself he took his telescope to his funding agency this is the Venetian Senate and they said that's a great piece of technology we can use it to spy ships entering the Venetian Lagoon and thus destroy the stealth advantage that they would otherwise have this was a great value to them they said let us do the following in exchange for you giving us copies of your telescope let us give you full professorship tenure and we will double your startup request so that's pretty good where's Jeff over here the astronomy faculty here so anybody would trade that gladly for a couple copies of a telescope that nowadays can buy online for under $50 so he had a great need for cash because he had many illegitimate daughters the famous book by Davis Szabo called Galileo's daughter tells these stories of how Galileo really needed to keep up this monopoly that he had on making these powerful astronomical and military telescope so he enjoyed the fame that the Siderius none see has brought him and for a while it was all good because he you know was basically doing what I'll be doing later on tonight so he was doing book signings that's always fun to do for any first-time author but later the position that he had been offered on the tenure track was in Padua which was within the realm of influence of the Vatican and the Vatican wanted him to disavow the teaching of Copernican theory even after the publication of Siderius nuncius but galileo he had a little too much cosmic hubris and what he did is he he refuted that that decision made by the Pope Pope Gregory up up urban and he said instead now I'm gonna keep writing about this and finally he wrote a book called the dialogue or dialogue Oh in which he contrasts and compares the models of Ptolemy and Aristotle with the model that he had and Copernicus had promulgated so he put the arguments of he himself and Copernicus in the words of a single character named Salvati which means the brilliant one I'm told and arguments of the Pope and Aristotle he put into a character whose name is simply Theo like the simpleton not a good idea okay out there so this resulted eventually he was brought in front of the Holy Office again a euphemism in the same way as I always say the IRS is a euphemism for money donations service okay this is a not they had no interest in and you know kind of seeing what the telescope could provide if they put their eyepiece of it so we got Leo's telescope he went out to here hundreds of light-years from Earth and then beyond that the next set of astronomers such as William Herschel turned even vaster telescopes to the galaxy at large and again made a similar proposition to what the pre Copernican z-- had made mainly they said we may not be the center on earth of the solar system but the solar system is the center of the galaxy or pretty close to it so here's a representation of Herschel's image of the Milky Way and he put the earth at the center or close to the center of the solar system at the sent near the center now the reason that he did this is also related to the properties of cosmic dust and I want to explain how that comes about so the very same substance that befuddled one of Galileo's and caused his biggest blunder in my less than humble opinion leads to a couple of factors that conspire to cause astronomers to make blunders and errors to this very day okay and so spoiler alert dust is going to keep coming back in this talk I'm not gonna talk about wormholes or multiverse as I could but I'm not going to I'm gonna talk about dust what you may think is really boring I hope to convince you it's really interesting okay so I'm a dust expert I spend my days researching dust now if you look through a mirror that our window that's dusty you will see a same amount of light diminished and that will cause you to imputed isten s-- to the object the same exact object with same luminosity same intrinsic brightness you'll attribute and ascribe a greater distance to it so dust diminishes the intensity of light it causes you to overestimate how far away the objects are that's one error that contributed to why hole a Hubble sorry Herschel made the picture that I described where the earth and the solar system is near the center of the galaxy the other thing that dust does is read in the light make the light red how many of you saw the beautiful sunset tonight on your way down here I saw it earlier today it's just phenomenal it looked like this this is not this taken from San Diego so this image here shows the Sun near the horizon this image here shows the Sun at Zenith now does the Sun change in the six hours between noon and and sunset of course not what changes how much dust is in the atmosphere it goes through and even the sunset tonight during these terrible fires in the season in California even the sunset tonight is even redder than this image shows of the Sun over the oceans and that's because there's much more smog and smoke in the atmosphere and the more atmosphere you look through along the tangent plane towards a sunset the more dust are looking for the more reddening and dust diminishing that it gets accomplished and dust also does something else it makes the light polarized it tends to orient the light at least in our galaxy in a very unique orientation I'll describe that so what caused Herschel's illusion was that he didn't realize we're actually out in the outskirts of the galaxy about two-thirds of the way out in our galaxy and just like you feel when you're inside of a cloud on an airplane at Kyle except the cloud is centered on you so as you heard I'm a commercially rated pilot I don't fly people commercially but in case you're wondering it's just for fun but when you are looking out the cockpit of an airplane or even in the passenger seat of an airplane and you're inside of a cloud it seems like the cloud is centered on you even though the cloud may have a very strange shape and not be centered on you you may be somewhere over there the same phenomenon happened in our galaxy and still does and it caused Herschel to feel like all the light was diminishing in every direction he looked and it looked like it was centered on him therefore we must be at the center of the galaxy so that was wrong we're actually as I say about 2/3 of the way out here's the galactic image that we know about today there are objects like globular clusters which Shapley and Curtis used to actually find the actual centre of the Milky Way being towards the constellation in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius and we're somewhere out here about 2/3 of the way out on the Milky Way's radius so quite far off from the center again dust creating a mirage tricking astronomers into the illusion that they're somehow central and important in the organization of the cosmos let's fast forward 400 years because we only have a you know an hour tonight and the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background made in central New Jersey one of the best discoveries the best things to ever come out of New Jersey I can say that because I'm a New Yorker I like to tease you guys and this discovery was really found serendipitously which I claim is the purest form of scientific discovery when you find something that you're looking for there sometimes is a bias called confirmation bias just like Galileo wanted to buttress the Copernican theory so to do astronomers who are scientists of any stripe who want to prove a theory fall into the trap of confirmation bias namely discarding evidence that disagrees with you and accepting evidence that agrees with you even if it's not justifiable given the evidence that you have it's a very pernicious phenomena and it affects cosmologists as well as any other scientist in this case they discovered it accidentally they were trying to communicate with the first telecommunication satellite found an irreducible set of noise amount of noise they could not get rid of no matter which direction they looked in no matter what season they looked in no matter what time of day even if they looked at New York even once they cleaned out a family of pigeons that had deposited a white dielectric material inside of the antenna they still could not get rid of it and the only decision that could be made after consultation with their neighbors and competitors at Princeton was that this glow must be the afterglow of the Big Bang the leftover heat after the formation of the elements in the first tens of minutes after the origin of the universe and so I like to say that these elements they're forged in a time period less than it takes to watch the sitcom The Big Bang Theory all the elements that make up the elements that form stars namely hydrogen helium a little bit of lithium etc the lightest elements all of that would ever form in cosmic inventory was formed in this tiny period of time less than a sitcom in length just phenomenal to think about now fast-forward another 50 years or so and my friends at NASA and my friends at the European Space Agency have made exquisite maps of the entire microwave background amplified the contrast in those images so that you don't just see a uniform 3 Kelvin glow instead you see tiny fluctuations the fluctuations are only about 100 parts per million to give you an idea of how minuscule those fluctuations in the amount of heat energy we receive from cosmic distances if you look at a bowling ball a bowling ball has fluctuations that are 10 times so a thousand parts are apart for a thousand so they're bigger fluctuations in the surface of a bowling ball especially my bowling ball has a lot of dents in it but a bowling ball what you think of as smooth has fluctuations that are much much rougher in a sense in the microwave background that's how exquisitely polished the uniform universe is so how did we get to be here this is the Hubble ultra-deep field how did all these structures get to be here some of these things are billions of times more dense so the fluctuations are not parts per million they're billions of times bigger so you're talking enhancement factors due to gravitational collapse of factors of trillions upon trillions so how do these tiny seeds these fluctuations in this pattern depicted on this beach ball here how do they grow into the clusters of galaxies that Hubble would see after say a few hundred million to a billion years in cosmic history they grow under gravitational collapse but how did they get there in the first place the best candidate for a theory that describes how seeds could be planted in the universe at a time when it was just after its origin that could then applause ibly grow under gravitational collapse to form these gravitationally bound structures called galaxies and clusters is called inflation I want to talk about inflation and make an analogy that will be a lot more familiar perhaps to some of us in the audience and that is we're trying to see the universe as it is about 1/2 a million years after we're using the picture of the universe though we my colleagues and I take of the universe as it was a half a million years after the Big Bang after time equals 0 and if you convert 1/2 a million years to seconds you get 10 trillion seconds sounds like a lot that's half a million it's not it's not a tremendous amount of time now what we're trying to do is unravel the quantum gravity epoch when the universe was dominated by a very exotic field called the inflow zone this is a quantum field quantum scalar field for you playing at home experts and this quantum field has properties like any other quantum field and that it has fluctuations it has ripples it has uncertainty associated with it it can't be uniform it's impossible to have a quantum field be perfectly uniform everywhere that is not allowable so this field suffused the universe perhaps it's diffused an even greater extent of space-time called the multi-verse but as I said I'm not gonna talk about the multiverse but if inflation is true most cosmologists believe that there multi-verse and that we just as we are just one planet out of eight released in our solar system and just as our Sun is one star out of a hundred billion in our galaxy and just as there's probably 100 billion galaxies or more in our universe there may be a hundred billion universes within the multiverse there may be 10 to the 500th universes in the multiverse there may be an infinite number of universes and so that really is quite mind expanding to think about but again I want to keep bringing things back down closer to home always thinking about dust always got to have dust in the back of your mind so what would this be like we're trying to take a picture taken at 10 to the 13 seconds infer from it what the universe looked like 50 orders of magnitude earlier in time what is that like well it's like taking this object here which is a collection of human stem cells called a blastocyst which represents the way that you looked a thousand seconds after the Big Bang that produced you this object here was produced and then later on it evolves right it grows and evolves inside of your mother now I couldn't take a picture of all of you guys here but I want to add some identifying features for you to guess who this person might evolve into someday so I had those though it's not Andy it looks could be like Andy but it's not instead it's my son's favorite astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson okay now that that really hurts okay I have to tell you be honest with you it's very painful to admit that now Neil good old Neil who's a fellow co-author in my publishing house I like to say that between Neil and myself we've sold about a million five thousand copies so that's pretty nice now this image represents Neil about 60 years old convert your age to seconds he's about two billion seconds old this objects about a thousand seconds old that's an extrapolation of only about two million this is an extrapolation of 50 orders of magnitude forty four orders of magnitude more challenging and yet we think we can do it in fact we think we did we had thought that we did it and I want to explain what happened so the image that I want you to keep in your mind so we stretched beyond what Galileo saw which was down here to the gap the realm of the nebula galaxies star and clusters of galaxies there's the so-called cosmic cages there's the CMB but what produced the CMB we like we think the best candidate for that that quantum field that caused the universe to have the features that would later grow into these anti satrapies these fluctuations later grow into these galaxies and clusters of galaxies later evolve into individual galaxies stars planets and people that's called inflation if you could prove inflation happen in some sense you would also be proving as I said that the multiverse hypothesis is true so the stakes are very high now how do you do it I'll ask for your trust that you can't do it by purely looking at images of the temperature fluctuations of the microwave background radiation they simply do not convey enough information to get more information you must use another property of light and it's called its polarization it tends to light tends to align in different directions after it interacts with matter and I'll explain that in just a second so if you have a flashlight but an incandescent flashlight it produces an unpolarized glow of visible light photons if those photons interact with matter in the form of an electron here it will cause it to oscillate in this plane here and I'll oscillate randomly like this if you have light from a from it if you view that light from another direction you don't see that the light is moving in this direction only you see it oscillating basically vertically purely vertically so you've converted an unpolarized light source into a polarized light source by scattering by interaction by a conflict or collision between light and matter that produces another property that you can then invert if I see polarized light then I can infer two things that the light must have been coming in and I said tropically in different amounts in different directions and it must have interacted with electrons so we know the early universe half a million years after the Big Bang had a lot of fluctuations in light we also know it had a lot of electrons the so-called primordial soup the plasma of protons electrons neutrons croutons no there were no Tong's burger now if you go to lovely san diego so this is i invite you to visit especially you Foothill College students who may be thinking about graduate school deadlines three weeks from now don't forget to apply now if you look at these waves these are called gravity waves not gravitational waves these are fluid waves of gravity that are the result of changes in pressure and density of water when light interacts with that you can see the pattern of it and actually the light will acquire a slight amount of polarization and you can use that polarization to infer things such as the properties of this matter now we know it's salt water but you can actually use it to measure things like salinity wave height wave direction what stimulated that wave to form remember polarization teaches you about the interaction of light and matter that's what's so fascinating useful and peculiar about polarization and so we thought with our colleagues that we could use the properties of the earliest light in the universe as a sort of detector of phenomena that happened at the Big Bang itself namely during the inflationary epoch so light scatters off of electrons that's called Thompson scattering and there's a couple of different ways that can scatter the most prominent one is called BR the most important one for the revelation of inflation it's called b-mode polarization I won't get into the details of b-mode polarization right now suffice it to say that if cosmologists were to see a swirling twisting pattern of the polarization of light we could infer that there are waves of gravity in the early universe not water waves but gravitational waves just like LIGO detected but not from two black holes colliding together but if you like all the matter and energy in the microwaves and and all the pressure and sound waves all those interacting with this resonation resonance of space-time itself detecting gravitational waves from inflation that would reveal the inflationary quantum gravitational epoch just an astounding discovery if true so here's the cartoon to keep in mind and with this we'll move into some of the telescopes and then a little travelogue and then back to the Nobel Prize and then we will end with plenty of time for thunderous applause okay this is the cartoon - keep in mind the Big Bang occurred creating gravitational waves if inflation took place inflationary gravitational waves / to perturb the cosmic background radiation is polarization imprinting a swirling twisting pattern on it called b-mode polarization this is what we would see if inflation ignited the Big Bang in the very earliest moments after the origin of the universe to do that is to make this discovery myself and my colleagues at Caltech created a telescope which was later incremented like Silicon Valley iPhone 8 iPhone 10 we originally called it bicep then it became bicep 2 we're currently observing bicep 3 and the next generation of experiment give you a guess at what it's called not bicep 4 bicep array but that's a story for another day this discovery made by this telescope set off a resonance around the world but first I want to describe what this telescope did it was very similar in spirit and there's no doubt in my mind that Galileo Galilei would recognize our telescope as being almost identical to his with a couple of different modifications but he would surely understand it it's a refracting telescope not 1 or 2 inches in diameter like this little guy but about 12 inches in diameter and the lenses were not clear optical lenses wake up back there I see you okay don't don't nod off but the lenses were not made of clear glass instead they're made of high-density polyethylene the same material used to make milk jug containers this may not look like much to you you may not be able to see through me but if you could see the microwaves coming from my face and yes there are some microwaves coming from my face you would see me either magnified or reduced or distorted in some way the same way you would is if this piece of or a piece of glass these are the lenses so so far so good very similar to Galileo's telescope where it differs from Galileo's telescope is instead of the squishy wet detectors in the back of his retina we use these very hard detectors printed on silicon appropriate for this valley but they're made of superconductors they're our type of super conductor whose resistance changes radically with its slight miniscule increase in temperature these detectors of which we only had 256 pixels you laughs but but we had to cool these down to 0.25 degrees above absolute zero so you can't do that with your iPhone and keep your warranty that won't work maybe the Apple Store folks don't like that instead of putting it on the flimsy little tripod that Galileo invented we put it on a massive 10-ton mount and here it is here it's soon after acquired a Twitter handle and then we had to deploy this instrument to not northern Italy where Galileo wasn't outside of Florence but we took it to the very bottom of the world Antarctica the word as I say Antarctica still send shivers up my spine when I hear about it because of all the stories I had heard about the great hardship that the initial discoverers of this frozen continent encountered many leading to their death so here are the first two teams to ever reach the South Pole one was led by Norwegians and they employed a special type of technology that they British were somehow either too proud to to utilize or too stupid not they're not stupid Brits are incredibly intelligent but they decided that they knew that the Norwegians when they got to the South Pole would eat the dogs and the Brits were totally averse to eating dog and so they decide to become the beasts of burden themselves so they sledge now mind you it's only 700 nautical miles it's not such a big deal right you know and you only have to go from sea level to 10,000 feet above sea level up giant glaciers and and crevasses where you could die and you're just carrying a couple of thousand kilos of scientific supplies and collecting meteorites which the these guys didn't do they they weren't doing a scientific expedition the way the Brits were and so when Scott's team the British team got to the South Pole they were terrified when they saw this staring at them from miles away our Norwegian flag how about that our Norwegian flag so they got there in frot Scott he said famously great god this is an awful place and all the more so for having reached it without priority meaning that he hadn't been there first and it really makes me think of how Nobel Prize discoveries happen as well you can get all the personal satisfaction you want from being the second person to discover something but unless you're the first unless you get there first you don't win the golden medallion that I'll talk about later there are a lot of parallels between Antarctic exploration and the pursuit of scientific knowledge now what must have this felt like to Robert Scott now there's a movie out recently creating a lot of controversy called first ma'am where they don't show the American flag on the moon for some reason now this is not meant to evoke that this is meant as a thought experiment consider what would have what would have felt like for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to step out of the Eagle Lander and see this awaiting them I've been devastated it would have been drinking you know tank for days now so it's still very dangerous to go to Antarctica and we don't get the the you'll have to deal with many of the creature comforts that they enjoyed a hundred and plus years ago but as I said it's still very dangerous as these videos that I've brought with me tonight demonstrates oh there's a penguin there which my five-year-old oh he says daddy bring me back a penguin when you go there and that's very cute but it never happens because they're vicious beasts okay you think they're cute cute terrifying and if you think that's bad they treat their own kind even worse as this video demonstrates okay you know as I always say it's still friendlier than most of our faculty meetings okay but anyway now when you go to the South Col you have to bring everything with you there are no cost goes down there there's no Walmart's you can't pick up stuff you have to bring it all with you and you have to wear most of it on the flight there so the thought is I guess the rationale is when you when your plane crashes the Sharks will be less likely to eat you if your body is slightly warmer than the surrounding temperature but here we are we're going to the South Pole we're going to Antarctica this is the New Zealand Air Force about ten percent of the entire New Zealand Air Force it's a c-130 airplane you can barely see back here but but you know then the United States Air Force has a formidable mascot the screaming eagle terrifying right Raptor disgusting are very terrifying now what is the mascot of the New Zealand Air Force you can't really see it but it's the Kiwi bird ok a flightless bird doesn't instill too much terror in the hearts of its enemies but that just shows you New Zealanders don't have many enemies okay except for Australian so they don't like Australia now you get on the plane this is what the inside of a c-130 cargo plane looks like there's barely one window on the entire passengered class this is your entire in-flight meal you have your in-flight entertainment you sit like this with your bags around you there's no bathroom flushing toilet on the plane there's a bucket in the back called the honeypot I'll leave that to your imagination why they call it that but at least it's only for 11 and a half hours okay it's not so bad really I've been on Southwest flights that are worse when you land at the South Pole eventually you make it there you go buy another type of flying snowmobile call the CL c-130 and you see the telescope that you've spent years working on that was buy some bicep stands for background imaging of cosmic extragalactic polarization and the reason I called the DAT is because what we're looking for is a curling twisting pattern of microwaves remember that's the b-mode polarization also known as curl polarization so biceps do curls I thought it was cute now when you land you're retreated to the south poles find this passenger terminal here's the Admirals Club is over here president's Club is there you get points and let know you don't now remember Scott said this is an awful place I flew there it took me between about it took me two days but the total flying time is only about say 14 hours from from New Zealand to get to the South Pole not so bad it took them months to get to the South Pole they end up dying and as I said they had to go from sea level to 10,000 feet over 700 nautical miles and they knew they're erasing the clock every moment and it wasn't just like cross-country skiing like you might do in Tahoe it was over these frozen waves of snow called cest roogie over crevasses underground caves that could collapse at any moment taking lives with with them so that's what it looked like back then this is what it looks like when I went okay I say it's an awesome place and we have a station there funded by you folks paying public that the National Science Foundation has put together and allows research by many countries not just the US as long as they're doing scientific research you can't go there if you want to do anything commercially or militarily it's an entire continent off-limits to that kind of exploitation just kind of cool and idealistic of course in the winter there might only be a couple hundred people on the whole continent and so some people spend an entire year there during which there's only one sunrise and sunset and so we like to say when we want someone to work there we'll pay you seventy thousand dollars for one night of work and you'd be surprised a lot of people take us up on that offer here's the very axis on which the earth is turning so right here the Earth's axis goes through so you can run around every time song on the earth and a second or two it's just an amazing place to be it can get down as cold as a hundred below zero Fahrenheit I can get as warm as you know basically zero Fahrenheit or there abouts huge temperature changes it's just an amazing place to be like a frozen planet from you know star wars or something so here's what I like to call the second most important building at the South Pole this is the Dark Sector laboratory we're bicep bicep to live bicep three lives it's the second most important building there's the first most important ok the outhouse you got a you know you've got to respect the outhouse now you notice the buildings are built up on stilts although the outhouse isn't that would be a trick to have a two-story outhouse I don't know how that would work could be kind of disgusting I'm sure better than a honey pot but this is built up on stilts because if not snow will eventually overcome the building and that's happened with many of the old buildings built in the 50s they don't really know where they are because they built them on the surface of the snow and every year there's feet of snow that build up from snow blown across the entire continent of Antarctica to avoid that they build it up on stilts so we look for this signal there's curling twisting pattern of microwaves and on March 17th st. Patrick's Day 2014 we announced we made the discovery of the thing we were looking for detection of b-mode polarization at degree angular scales using bicep - so this was a phenomenal achievement everywhere around the world resonated to this discovery up the road at Stanford there was a video posted that same morning of the announcement and they garnered two million hits within a couple of hours just phenomenal this is with the one of the theorists credited with some of the early discoveries of the theory of inflation hearing the announcement from one of my colleagues professor challenge that we had discovered this theory of the proof of this theory essentially that inflation was correct remember inflation multi-verse incredible mind-blowing discovery press conference at Harvard filled with Nobel laureates in the front rows there we made headlines around the world including the newspaper of record the San Diego union-tribune and and other newspapers front page above the fold as they say space ripples seen as the big bang smoking gun there's me looking wistfully I like this headline in the Economist because it sounds like just some dude is watching oh that man saw the beginning of time that's not what happened but it's also none of these really compared to my favorite headline in the onion okay so the onion is the premier science newspaper of course in all of the world and they convened a panel they said of top theoretical physicist and R&B singers to debate the meaning of forever the caption says panelists discuss whether it is theoretically possible to give you my heart forever and down here we can observe long-term phenomena like the CMB primordial b-mode polarization and the love between india arie and her man all of which seem to have existed since the universe's infancy now we can all in this auditorium we can start to smell that something's not right so actually you can actually smell what would ended up getting in the way of our discovery right can sort of smell their smoke in the air that smoke is just like the dust grains that eventually would be seen as the cause of a signal we imputed to inflation so within months of discovery we started to get a taxed I describe in the book is the most traumatic perilous moments of my scientific career hearing that we may have made a colossal universal mistake or a blunder and people were criticizing us from all angles and it was up to us to really uncover what was wrong or right and back up our findings eventually it came to be through collaboration with a competitor a satellite called the Planck satellite launched by the European Space Agency we work together to discover that the signal that had been twisting and curling the microwave polarization was nothing more than grains of cosmic smoke dust grains in our galaxy not unlike the dust grains that Galileo was befuddled by and Herschel before him and later Hoyle and and and many other scientists throughout cosmic astronomical history these grains of dust can acquire a tiny bit of magnetism to them and in so doing become influenced by the Milky Way's magnetic field so all things that we know about have magnetic fields galaxies have magnetic fields planets have them even people have the birds have them and you can use them for certain purposes but in this case they exactly mimic the signal we were seeking and we couldn't have known it at the time because we weren't able to access the data we needed to prove or disprove our claim of detection so we went ahead with it we put in some caveats and eventually we had to retract that and that was very humiliating but at least we knew what we had seen was not the pristine view of the cosmos looking out from the South Pole all the way back to inflation but in fact the universe is a pretty smoggy smoky place that there's dust than almost all size scales in the universe from planetary scales up to galactic scales and even in clusters of galaxies and for astronomers to look back and read the prologue of the Big Bang we have to look through a lot of dust in the dust jacket of the cosmos now I don't want you to get the impression that dust is all bad because as the late great Carl Sagan said without dust we wouldn't be here so it's a famous poem that he wrote on the occasion of the Voyager satellite taking a selfie of the Earth from beyond the orbit of Saturn on Valentine's Day 1990 here's the picture it's called the pale blue dot I'm Sagan says we succeeded in taking that picture and if you look at it you see a dot that's here that's home that's us every saint and sinner in the history of the species lived there on a mote of dust spend it in a sunbeam very poetic what is he saying the earth is just a giant grain of dust or ball of dust and even the dust can do things like form from the iron within a type 2 supernova and that iron can eventually make its way into the earth and into your mother and into your blood in the form of hemoglobin that flows through your veins right now it's just astonishing this inter connectivity as Sagan said we were all Stardust I like this picture taken by my friend Brent Rose and that shows cosmic dust this is dust in the Milky Way galaxy these are lanes of dust the planet this kind of Mesa of looking thing over here and people two figures that you can't see they're made of dust and the planets made of dust and the Milky Way is pulsating with dust it's just amazing to think about how important dust is as I said it's far more important than a wormhole and we have far more evidence that it exists unlike a wormhole and so things that are exotic are fun to think about but first you have to get past the darn dust jacket so along with the dust kind of blowing in the interstellar wind went my chances at Nobel glory blown away but fear not for just a few weeks after retracting this in this embarrassing event for myself but it was part of a healing process within cosmology to reconcile and rectify the discoveries that we made with what was actually happening we didn't make a blunder we didn't leave the lens cap on or free to get to connect a fiber optic cable we didn't make a blunder we imputed an origin to the signal that we saw that was incorrect and now we know that there's even more evidence than ever for the reality of the signal we saw we believe it everybody believes that we were right the interpretation was wrong but being a good scientist means you have to reconcile what you say with the data that you have and try to be as immune as possible from these confirmation bias as you can be as I said a couple of months after this retraction I received a letter from hmm the Nobel Committee for physics inviting me Professor Brian G Keating the honor of nominating winners for the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2016 okay so imagine you're here and you're a realtor any real Realtors in the audience any lawyers in the audience okay can you go over there please no no that's fine I love lawyers Hubble said I'd rather be a second-rate astronomer than a first-rate lawyer but I love lawyers so imagine you're a lawyer client comes to you prospective client says I'd like to you know hire you get your services but actually I don't like you that much can you recommend a better lawyer it wouldn't feel so good and that's what I felt like when I got this letter in the mail and it asked me to do a couple of things it asked me to consider work done long ago for multiple people candidates and plural to be worthy of the Nobel Prize in Physics now I'm an academic so I went back to the original source material reading list itself Alfred Nobel's will handwritten in Paris the year before he died remember and I speak fluent Swedish as you all do I'm sure no I helpfully the Nobel the Nobel Foundation translates it on the website and if you translate it into English it says the whole of my estate shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who during the preceding year shall have conferred the greatest benefits of mankind a portion that follows one part to the person who shall made the most important discovery in physics so a single person who made a discovery last year that had the greatest benefit to mankind that's a pretty tall order so for inspiration I went back and looked at different Nobel Prizes one in the past so I gave this talk at the San Diego astronomy associations meeting and they all got this right so I'm counting on you all to get this rung and ask for a show of hands one of these discoveries won the Nobel Prize two did not who thinks the Nobel Prize was won for the discovery of the RNA molecule all these were eligible for Nobel prizes very good who thinks number two the periodic table which has I remind you element number 102 nobelium who thinks number two won the Nobel Prize who thinks number three the lighthouse won the Nobel Prize okay not everyone so anyone does not like raising their hand in public please raise your hand of course it's the lighthouse come on people because the lighthouse so important it creates a great benefit to your life and Gustov tall in on it for the invention not just in the lighthouse but for the invention of automatic regulators for use in conjunction with gas accumulators for illuminating light hesitant buoys whoo that's really impressive stuff now I got here using a lighthouse as I'm sure many of you did you don't need a GPS oh she's a lighthouse right now this is big stuff back then he was Swedish he invented that the year before a single person it had a benefit to mankind so it's perfectly in keeping with Alfred Nobel's wishes so I thought that's pretty interesting now there have been controversies beyond those controversies so nowadays we're we're hearing rumors of Nobel Prizes not this year but next year for our fearless leader right we are also hearing things that are not so funny so we're hearing about rampant allegations of sex abuse that led to the cancellation of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2018 and may lead to its cancellation next year the king of Sweden stepped in and implored the Nobel Academy to change its rules in order that the Nobel Prize could undergo a period of reflection re-examination to rectify these past wrongs the last thing I want to talk about is getting slightly better which is the first sentence in Alfred Nobel's will says the following I offered no bail do hereby mature and would give my last Testament to my nephews slam waar and Ludwig Nobel I bequeath the sum of two hundred thousand crowns to my niece Mina one hundred thousand crowns okay so the women got half as much he had no children of his own by the way he had no wife no spouse nothing never married so these are all is only living heir she gave half as much to the only girl in his life woman in his life and some say that's the that's the origin of the Nobel Prize in Physics legendary sexism fewer than 1% of all laureates have been won by women luckily this year the trend was broken so that's quite awesome still we can list all the three women who have won it in the past hundred and seventeen years on one slide fit them all there at their names and everything the years they wanted and everybody's rightfully celebrating Donna Strickland's this award that was given out this year and she'll receive it on December 10th which is the anniversary not of Alfred Nobel's birth but of his death kind of weird but anyway they celebrate and give away these prizes in the day he died and I'd like to point out this is great but they wouldn't to give the Nobel Prize to women only women in physics for the next 75 years to have an equal number of male and female laureates there's still a huge huge gender imbalance of the Nobel Prize so much so that even this year when the chemistry prize was shared by a female a professor of physics at Caltech this is the headline at JPL the Jet Propulsion Laboratory a couple of days after she was awarded the most prestigious accolade in humanity has to offer Caltech mom wins Nobel Prize and actually reminded me I met I met Maria Gephardt Meir she was at UCSD when she won the Nobel Prize I met her son on the occasion I dedicated a stamp for her discovery of the world's longest slide rule no no she discovered the nuclear structure and the so called magic numbers that described nuclear stability won in 1963 her son Joseph said to me when my father my mother won the Nobel Prize the headline in the Union Tribune or whatever the newspaper was called back then said local housewife wins Nobel Prize so there's a long way to go this just depicts us so there's a huge uproar about this a couple hours later they took it down I'm glad I got a screen shot and I want to close by describing an event that I participated in which was upon the occasion of submission of the first draft of my manuscript for losing the Nobel Prize my cosmic memoir I submitted it this gentleman Duncan Holliday and came to UCSD where he had done the work that garnered him the 2016 Nobel Prize the prize that I was supposed to nominate him for don't tell him I did not nominate him actually nobody's supposed to know I forgot to tell you nobody supposed to know that I was one of the nominators of the Nobel Prize that year don't tell anyone okay please please do me a huge favor instead strictly confidential he brought his Nobel Prize with him to his colloquium and there were people there are physicists young and old idolizing the Nobel Prize not him Nobel Prize itself taking selfies with it kissing it bowing down to it it really made me think of the episode of the Golden Calf where people make an idol out of something themselves and then worship it and it made me kind of nauseated to be honest with you that physicist the most brilliant the most the most rational members of humanity could be so-so base and Craven to their desires to worship a golden image it made me quite embarrassed actually and I felt so tired oh my god so even I who had written a book about the evils of the Nobel Prize in some sense or the perils that it's causing on scientist in society I could not resist the temptation to pose for a selfie and he's a wonderful guy I don't think I don't I don't have any problems with any of the winners it's the process by which it's awarded and it's so much so that society likes to elevate winners like American Idol and the Oscars and so forth that even it hits scientists and mathematicians this happened just this past summer the Fields Medal which is called and referred to as the Nobel Prize for mathematics so there is no Nobel Prize in mathematics but this is called that it was stolen minutes after it was awarded so why would you steal some piece of metal that it's only it's I mean it's worth 15 grand okay and that's nice but obviously that wasn't the reason that somebody wanted to make off with it it's 15,000 Canadian but it did you know I feel terrible for the guy who I mean he eventually got the medal back but it gave me an idea for my next book style okay this is good stealing the Fields Medal coming soon from Bryan Keating okay I want to conclude bike with a couple of words about where do we go from here in cosmology and in the Nobel Prize first of all refer to Mahatma Gandhi nominated five times for the Nobel Peace Prize never wanted Hitler was nominated once also didn't win it thank God Mahatma Gandhi said the seeker after truth should be humbler than the dust the world crushes dust under its feet but the seeker after truth should so humble himself that even the dust could crush him only then and not until then will he have a glimpse of truth it's kind of beautiful it's saying the only pardon our dust but embrace the dust get down and dirty with the dust and in doing so we can do great things we can make discoveries cognizant of the role that dust plays in the universe and how are we doing that well I'm privileged to be leading a project called the Simon's Observatory made up of about 140 of the world's most brilliant scientists and here's a list of places around the world where we have we have bases that are working on this project it's funded in large part by these two foundations one of which is located not far from here the heisting Simons Foundation it's a seventy million dollar project to look out into the universe not only for the wispy imprint of inflationary gravitational waves the multiverse etc but also at dust how do we do that well the 70 million dollars that we've received is being used to build a gigantic space vacuum cleaner now you're laughing okay now we're not doing that I'll be ridiculous instead we're building telescopes and instead of only looking at the cosmic signals we're also spending a lot of our time looking at dust and then removing that dust because you can't build a cosmic vacuum cleaner as much as I would like to here's where it's going to be located on a plateau not far from the Symonds ray project led by myself and adrian lee at UC berkeley and not far from the atacama cosmology telescope over there and it's gonna have an array of telescopes each one more powerful than the bicep telescope cool down to point one degree above absolute zero just an insanely cold temperature what we're gonna do is observe at multiple frequencies and dedicate some of the observing time and effort into only looking at dust as Mahatma Gandhi said you want to be humble that the dust could crush you if you don't account for it some of these telescopes are basically purely looking at dust afterwards we can remove it and what we're left with hopefully will be the pristine signal we were seeking all along here's just the design it's another refracting telescope just like my bicep project except cool down much lower I'd use a very special type of detector technology built up the road at UC Berkeley that is a fractal type of antenna that can see multiple frequencies at once and then there's another detector system built by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder that does essentially the same thing not with a fractal spiral antenna though okay the last thing I want to say is what was the final sentence of Alfred Nobel's will Alfred said finally it is my express wish that following my death my veins shall be cut open and when the been done and competent doctors had confirmed clear signs of death by the way if you cut open your veins you're definitely dead okay that would be the clearest sign possible and then if you want to be really over killed then you take your remains and you cremate them in a crematorium I have no idea given what they've done with the will that Alfred Nobel specified it should be given to a single person and the PRU did something in the preceding year that had the greatest benefit to all of mankind I have no idea if he's cremated if he stuffed somewhere or where he is okay I'd like to think that they adhered to this will but it made me think and it's part of the motivation for my books title one title aspect of it the titles of double entendre as the French would say one is how I personally lost the Nobel Prize came within a hair's breadth of winning it lost it ultimately the other meaning is what should be done to the Nobel Prize to better reflect the way that science is done today not in the late 1890s so I hope that you'll be able to check the book out and come along on a cosmic journey of discovery revelation and most importantly of dust thank you very much if you had won the Nobel Prize and had that hopes moment would you have forgotten to keep it ah so would I have gotten to keep it so I like to say people say well you just kind of have sour grapes about this whole thing and you're not really you know telling the truth and I say well if you want to see if I'm sincere just award me the Nobel Prize and see if I reject it or not or I'm a hypocrite so I suppose I would been able to keep at you the instructions beyond saying complete opposite of what Alfred Nobel asked for they've had a very clear insert that said you may not nominate yourself so I took that very clearly and at that moment I think we were clear in in many ways that we needed to get confirmation of our discovery for it to hold up to be even eligible for myself for anybody on the team to win a Nobel Prize required confirmation confirmation which never came and it's still elusive that means the signal is out there to be discovered but I claim that even if I do discover it I shouldn't win the Nobel Prize for doing so because there's just too much temptation when you're looking for a signal to find it and overlook evidence to the contrary and so I think that discoveries like that are more like the discovery of dark energy or dark matter for that for that matter those are the types of discovery serendipitous discoveries that should truly warrant the Nobel Prize Thanks over here could you could you please elaborate about on your slide about polarization yes sorry you want me to show the slide yes no yes and could you explain like on the axis like horizontal axis so I can see this topologically you have plus plus one defect and on the right side is something like different so so there's two different types of polarizations is what's called a mode polarization and there's b-mode polarization so the without getting too into too much detail during this period let me say that gravitational waves shown here gravity waves what they do is they cause space and time to be sheared so they also cause a compression and a rarefaction of space-time that's basically what LIGO discovered that the two arms of its interferometer we're squishing and squashing in a certain way but you could also have a wave of gravity that causes them to shear slight amount and the early universe would have been populated by equal amounts of a polarization that would squish and then that would shear and only the shear terms can create this pattern down here called B modes so the compression and rarefaction produces what's called emotes on different phase planes separated by 180 degrees and the B modes can only be created by great waves of gravity and that's because they're the only things that can shear space-time over cosmic distances and so for that reason they're referred to as The Smoking Gun of inflation they're the only things that can be produced on cosmic scales equal amounts in all directions at all times this is like lights coming in in the multiple polarization this is showing light coming in that's unpolarized in two different directions hotter over here colder over here scattering and producing a polarized signal and the outcome this is called Thompson scattering that produces polarization of any kind emote or so the question is how do you get this anti satrapy of the light there's multiple ways to get one way is from the compression of space-time itself but from the symmetry principle would you also get minus one so yeah so that so the minus one so this is like plus one and this is like minus one this is positive B mode negative is also plus one two spin numbers what could talk later the gravitation ways have two different polarizations plus and cross and the cross ones are contributing here okay yeah is space-time really flat everywhere you look is there any kind of anomalous regions where LIGO would maybe help you identify yeah bicep so so they're something called a cosmological principle which says that space-time is flat over cosmic distances on the scale of you know past you go to past mega parsecs that space-time becomes uniform and homogeneous meaning that not that there's a city there there's an equal amount uniform distribution it's just that the statistical properties are constant like the air in this room I can't tell you if there's a molecule right there but I can tell you in a box they'll be an average of so and so many molecules and between them there's empty space so on the scale of molecules it's not uniform it's highly non-uniform in homogeneous but on the scale of my hand or you know a volume it is and that's what we call temperature and pressure in the early universe this pattern here is statistically isotropic is the same in all different scales once you get beyond a certain skill so on cosmic scales the universe is flat on local scales it's not actually I think there was a talk here not too long ago which talked about gravitational lensing which is the bending of space time by matter and its effect predicted by Einstein that he thought would never be discovered we're actually using that property to infer the properties of other aspects from the microwave background so yes you're right it's flat on the largest scales but highly non flat non-uniform on the scales of galaxies thank you for a very entertaining and informative so I have a general question in cosmology if I may I read that a distant object when it emits light even when it mr. white when that object is moving faster than the speed of light relative to us that light still reaches us is that true and if so so it's not sure that light that there are things moving faster than the speed of light the universe the outer boundaries of the University observable universe is receding away at a speed that is greater than the speed of light is highly redshifting the light that we see that's why the microwave background is reduced in gian frequency by a factor of a thousand since the time it was produced as the universe is cooled and expanded their regions beyond which objects like galaxies are moving away from us faster than the speed of light now there's another phenomenon which I thought you're gonna ask about which is what happens when a particle is moving fast through a medium like ice is moving faster than the speed of light in that medium so media like this lens or water they slow it slows down the speed of light by what's called the dielectric constant and so you could have a particle theoretically that's moving faster than the speed of light like a neutrino or something like that it can emit what's called Cherenkov radiation it's kind of like a sonic boom the analog of a sonic boom for light is Cherenkov radiation I don't know if that's what you're asking but there aren't we don't have like we don't see objects say moving locally to us that we could somehow communicate with that are moving faster than the speed of light no my question was if you consider a galaxy say for example so far away now that it is moving faster than the speed of light relative to us and it emits light now well that way that light will reach us in the future I read no there's a horizon beyond which we won't be able to see right so there's an analog yeah so you so it's not unlike say the situation where an astronaut is falling into a black hole when that astronaut gets close to the black hole there's a gravitational redshift so you could still see light now but if somebody you know is shooting a beam of light from that galaxy to us today that's very different than say you know as I said as an astronaut falls into a black hole you'll see the last image of the astronaut as long as there's light but will be highly highly redshifted and so will impute from that a great distance and so that's how we're actually we actually invert that to measure the distance to objects and that recessional speed we use the redshift and that tells us how what fraction of the speed of light it's moving so something moving that's at a redshift greater than one is moving relative a stir than the speed of light meaning the expansion the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light wondering what was it like to compete with another team yeah well I suck a lot in the book that you know competition has good things and it's good not to have a monopoly where there's only one person they can do whatever they want or one group it's good to have a variety of different resources but at the same token there's so much emphasis placed on priority of making the discovery first and when you do make the discovery getting more access to resources to getting more access to publicity getting access to a to to really perks including one which I didn't even know about until I started writing this book which is if you want to know about prize you're automatically entitled for the rest of your life to nominate winners of the Nobel Prize in the future which is a perk that nobody else gets so what ends up happening is that if you work for somebody who has a Nobel Prize or you know we're the teacher of somebody or you know you're much more likely yourself to win the Nobel Prize so it's kind of this math you affect the rich get richer and I think that distorts the way that science is perceived because that's not really the way that science is done there's not like some Oracle and only he or she knows everything and you must learn from that person so there's always competition healthy competition is good but when it becomes the really sin qua non of how you're gonna be evaluate I was told to get tenure I need to win a Nobel Prize or be on track to win a Nobel Prize and the woman who wanted this year Donna Strickland she wasn't even a full professor when she won the Nobel Prize she won the Nobel Prize then the next day they made her full professor okay it was another perk hopefully she'll do better than Galileo when he got it everyone at one to more questions okay is there one more over there yeah I wonder if this sort of follows on what you just said but I wonder if not only I mean the the Nobel Prize is perhaps symbolic of the whole framework in which science is done and I wonder if there is a need for an overhaul of the entire framework including funding and other aspects and secondly after your book well do your ideas have a lot of do it are there other physicists who agree with you and is there is there a lot do you hear a lot from physicists who agree with you on the after yeah yeah good question yeah so the first point yes I think the Nobel Prize needs to be overhauled and reformed that's the meaning of the second meaning of the book's title that it needs to be lost in its current form resurrected in another form meaning that you should use its prestige to agitate for improvement I think look at Hollywood look at the Oscars look at politics look at the me2 movement all these things you know have were suffering because they essentially had a monopoly on their industry the Nobel Prizes the biggest monopolies there's no close second in science or an elsewhere and so yes I think that there's a great need for it I online five key ways to go about that in the book the book is mostly not about the Nobel Prize I was I was surprised my publisher I said I want to print that there's only three chapters out of 13 about the no blow I said can you print the sides of the pages and the chapters about the Nobel Prize in gray so people can skip it if they don't want this is sure we can do that I was like wow okay cool better than the dust jacket but but when we ended up writing it I ended up getting a lot of positive feedback that everybody agreed with most of my suggestions except for the one I make about serendipitous discoveries that I say that those are the most pure scientific discoveries because you're not looking to make a discovery you accidentally discover something and then you beat the hell out of it to make sure you understand it better than anyone else I think those are the purest discoveries those are also some of the discoveries that have been left out of the Nobel Prize your Rubin discovered serendipitously dark matter Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars serendipitously her advisor won the Nobel Prize her male advisor for Jocelyn Bell's discovery of pulsars but that was serendipitous she put in a ton of hard work to figure out what was it that she saw and I think that that's brilliant great thank you all very much I'll be outside to sign copies of the book and I bet special bookmarks made of real fake Nobel gold any purchases of the book tonight thank you

Channel: SVAstronomyLectures

Views: 6,736

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Keywords: astronomy, science, astrophysics, science news, cosmology, Nobel Prize, cosmic microwave background, telescopes, Brian Keating, scientific research, science prizes, Big Bang, BICEP Project

Id: fMgVx2ijWoY

Length: 76min 18sec (4578 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 10 2018

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[u/alllie]

What would it have been like to be an eyewitness to the Big Bang? In 2014, astronomers using the powerful BICEP2 telescope at the South Pole thought they’d glimpsed evidence of the period of cosmic inflation at the beginning of time. But had these scientists been deceived by a galactic mirage? In this popular-level talk, cosmologist Brian Keating tells the inside story of BICEP2’s detection and the ensuing scientific drama. (Dr. Keating's popular book, "Losing the Nobel Prize" was selected for several lists of the best science books of the year.)

[u/JurijFedorov]

This sounds kinda fascinating. Honestly want to watch it for the drama and not the science as I rather watch documentaries about the physics itself.