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

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Dr Brian keading Dr Brian keing 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 human humans discovering things about themselves and about the world Dr keing 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 desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the General Public public in keeping with that theme this podcast episode does include sponsors and now for my discussion with Dr Brian keing Dr Brian keading 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 uh and you do as well and I'm delighted that we're going to talk today because I have a longstanding adoration there's no other appropriate word for eyes Vision Optics the Stars the moons the sun I mean animals humans what's more interesting than 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 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 you know unrelated to each other right but it turns out the word Cosmos in Greek the atmology of it is beautiful or appearance so it's we have a beautiful appearance you know we 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 evoke something viscerally in us we humans are born with two refracting telescopes in our in our skulls embedded in our skulls and as you point out you know the retina outside the cranial Vault right I'll 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 higs Bon 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 of 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 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 it's a new some people say their birthday their kids's birthday their if they're smart their anniversary right you know you don't want to get too out of out of control with the misses um 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 un 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 that as it existed before time itself began so to me it's 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 you know 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 you know 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 of dehydration can diminish 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chocolate medley flavors back in stock I really like the chocolate flavors especially the chocolate mint when it's heated up so you put in hot water and that's a great way to replenish electrolytes and hydrate especially when it's cold and dry out outside when hydration is especially critical if you'd like to try element you can go to drink element.com huberman to claim a free element sample pack with the purchase of any element drink mix again that's drink element.com 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 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we get to the origins of the universe and the organization of the planets relative to the Sun and their spins Etc you said something that at least to me feels int 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 yeah 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 a diameter Etc we might not know what that is just by looking at them you probably do but but they also change our perception of time and you know 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 Etc 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 exquisitly 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 and 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 gives us the sense of an expansion of time as opposed to just the expansion of space hm well first of all we have to take ourselves back you know to 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 causitive of the seasons and that was of you know Divine important you know Supreme importance for them right their whole existence in early agrarian societies hunting societies Gathering socities um so they had to know about time so time the the essence of time and that 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 Lasco that you know date back to the you know 40,000 bcee um they depict constellations Orion the hunter Taurus the Bull all these different constellations they depict them there now partially that was because you know Netflix didn't exist back then right there was no Tik Tok and and so there wasn't much to do at night and in fact the more you were out at night you probably increased your opportunity to be you know consumed by some Predator right so you were 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 C 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 um the Contour of a of a mountain ridge yes and and the and the repetition of it over and it 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 you know 10,000 years old or something like that so to store information that meant it was a continuity between Generations my great- great grandfather's Elders whatever taught me that when the moon is in this constellation the sun is in this constellation um we all should plant or we should you know harvest in other con in other times and so it was and it we still do used the you know the rotation of the earth you know hasn't changed that much since this 40,000 year period right I mean the the axis in which it rotates that's a different story but uh but the 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 uh 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 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 you know see at that time up to Saturn um and they actually would associate those not only with astronomical events but events down on Earth that's what connected the Earth so we we have Legacy of that in our calendar today so Sunday named after the Sun Monday Moon Tuesday and you go to the Latin languages I think it's Mercury Mercury day which is mercury day uh vent Venus day so you go to the romance languages and then uh the only one that's not a Latin name is of course for Thor the God Thor Thursday and then uh comes back Saturn day Saturday so they were all used as a clock and you 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 that all different conditions on the pitching deck of a ship till the 1700s basically it was a huge problem and so measuring time became crucial for Commerce for uh you know 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 causitive that actually the position of the planet Jupiter determined something on the day of your birth and the son's relative position with respect to it determined something about your your your future and your and your you know prospects in life and and so forth so when I'm not confused for a cosmetologist you know because my lovely hair and makeup uh I'm usually asked you know oh you're an astronomer um I'm a Virgo you know so uh what's going to happen to me I'm like I used to be okay that's an astrologer I'm not an astrologer but now I just I kind of lean into it I'm like o that uh you're going to get a letter from the IRS next week and that lump on your ass mean you you're you're playing games with them so you don't believe in astrology uh there's no evidence for astrology in in fact there's there's you know many many random controlled you know trials double bun studies that show not only is it it's almost counter to the evidence you know like when 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 protozoa could throw a dart yeah it's it's almost anti-correlated you know with with what reality is so no there's certainly no validity to that and I I added you know provocative tweet uh you know whatever post recently um and it was about um there's actually you know we believe there are 12 zodiac con signs 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 that was the base of their number system our number system is 10 because we have 10 fig for some reason they love base 60 I don't know why um and so they love things that divided evenly into it 10 does but anyway uh you know hash fail for the for the Babylonians but they divide up into 12 12 uh zodiac signs so we still use those there's a problem though the Zodiac that you're do you know what this is do you know what determines your zodiac sign no okay so it it's determined by the position of the sun what constellation was the sun in on the day you were born September 26th so uh when the that means that the sun was in the constellation Vergo oh no you are a Libra Libra Libra okay so you do know what you are but you don't know why you are uh so Libra me means it's a constellation there's 88 constellations that are accepted by astronomers and the uh 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 uh Proto Proto solar system dis 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 that the spin of that disc all things have a spin associated with them like a figure skater you know as 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 as a type of angular momentum the whole disc is spinning in a plane it's like this desk this table that sitting at if listening imagine a flat table it's spinning a circular disc 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 on the day you were born there's a constellation behind the Sun from our perspective that was Libra on September 26th and that was the day that you were born that determines the fact that you're 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 th 5,000 years ago it's called ukas so there's a certain segment of people born in a 17-day stretch in December late November to early December that are actually aukin or ukases or whatever so that should obliterate astrology as any semblance of a science because they didn't even know the 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 you know histories past Futures and um 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 uh when I was dating my wife who would become my wife in the beginning um we she you know kind of thought it's fun maybe we'll go see a you know uh uh you know someone who can tell our our our fortunes that we belong together so we went to an astrologer and uh the astrologer asked me a bunch of questions you know when were you born obviously and um oh no she asked me what's your sign so I I said I'm a Gemini and she said okay cool and then she told me a bunch of things and at the end I said I just want to double check and I was playing I'm kind of a you know a little bit of a jerk sometimes so I said I just want to confirm um Gemini is born in September I'm born in September setember 9th oh no no that's a Virgo but the same things are going to happen to you anyway like it didn't change her outcome and so in the language of the science philosophy of science Carl poer others it's unfalsifiable and you cannot be proven right it's so flexible you know you're going to find challenges the stock market is going to fluctuate uh political turmoil rain during your 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 strikes me is the fact that at least is the way you describe it the first clock the first timekeeping approach or mechanism was to evaluate the position of things in the sky relative to Celestial landmarks yeah so irrespective of when people are born in astrology uh I could imagine a a a tribe of people a group of people who have charts because they've you know painted them onto some surface doesn't matter with the surface is that um at some portion of the year uh the stars are above this Ridge there are three bright stars above the the the ridge just to the to the left of the front of the village so to speak like this is not an unreasonable thing to imagine and that information has passed down in the form of when those three stars are about to disappear behind that Ridge um days are getting shorter whereas when those three stars are um reemerging again elsewhere in the sky yes days are getting longer um forgive me this will be a little bit of a long question sometimes the listeners get upset with me but I think it'll frame it within the biology in a way that 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 clock keeping mechanism of all mamalian species and reptiles most people don't realize this but reptiles um 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 mind 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 a light in your ear 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 light but in any case the pineal of humans is embedded deep in the skull and so that information about uh how much light is in the environment has to be passed through the eyes through a Securus circuit to the through a Securus path to the to the pineal but here's the thing here here's the the conundrum an animal or human born into an 8-hour day when days are getting longer has a very different future as an infant as a infant or baby that's born into an8 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 and 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 and even the mother during and immediately after uh childbirth was strongly dictated by what resources were available the strength of the immune system Etc 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 needed 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 detect able 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 absolutely and and not only correlated with that um something even more perhaps basic is you know temperature right in the hemisphere that you're born in uh you would expect that all you know I'm I'm born as I said September 9th turns out that's the statistically statistically most common birth date of humans on Earth and why is that because people are busy during the winter holiday exactly right so there's a correlation right yeah they're at home and they're indoors and and they're they're procreating and they right um or another thing is uh uh what month you're born in you go back nine months so so actually the the um you know cons uh capitalism is awesome right so it's so efficient so when you go to CVS I I've known this you know several times thank God because my wife's been pregnant several times and um and we have several kids and when you go to CVS it's it's actually pretty interesting she goes there to buy a pregnancy test now she's the kind of neurotic you know person that she she had to buy like five pregnancy tests for each kid okay I don't know why but that's what she did so she's a she likes data she's got the how do you okay everybody statistics how do you reduce variability increase 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 you know whatever she got the gold card from CVS uh because she's done it so many times uh but um 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 wipes and stuff because they know this they know hedging even without KN 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 uh the temperature right so if you're gestating during uh summertime versus winter time that obviously will have some kind of an effect I mean you can tell me a lot more than that but more than that you hinted at this um and I'm not going to make you do any any math surrounding pregnancy but um God forbid but I sympath I put out the cor I was talking fast with the irony of that one I'll just say for the record I'm just blushing the the irony of that one is that we published numerous times for my lab cumulative probability and I teach this stuff so it's often times when you're going fast but that one I totally deserved and I you know whatever whatever shades of red I might I might turn that's what a good scientist does but uh but but they actually think that the first astronomers were women think about it because they notice 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 the minute it's insane right um that that they would have looked up and noticed this renewal and and and 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 wasn't until like the 1700s in England um where she was recognized for using telescopes and so forth but but no they were very keen on that and they were they were probably dialed into that and what that portended as you alluded to for the future of their child I mean this is a huge biological investment men didn't don't have that so actually we are less symmetrical you know this than women right we have our testies or different links or whatever I guess normal 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 menstral cycle some women are keenly aware of the ovulation event they will describe it as a feeling as if it's breaking off and and migrating within them and I I have every reason to believe them earlier you asked and I know this um will get some people to ears pricked up whether or not uh when a child is born with respect to the seasonal cycle impacts that child there there are a lot of data around this MH it depends on um the environment in which one lives so closer to the Equator yeah it's very different situation the equal day is all day long there were some data and I'd love to get an update on this so um somebody knows they can put in the comments that you know that schizophrenia was far more um prevalent As you move away from the equator and then there was a guy at Caltech he has since passed but had um 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 was causal of course and then there are all sorts of interesting things about you know uh placental effects and and so there's there it's a multivariable thing and we know that because identical twins even that share the same cionic sack right uh one can be schizophrenic and the other no although there is a higher concordance than if say they're in different they're a dichorionic two two different uh 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 um various infectious diseases influenza in particular these things are 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 uh of our solar system outside of the Sun then it would be clear and you could do this test with identical twins and and and that are identical versus fraternal twins twins that are raised with the same parent you know some are separated at Birth and they they they turn out very much more similarly when they're identical twins ver so shows that genetics play more of a role than we like to think jeans jeans are powerful they are I realize this is a a bit um Politically Incorrect to say in certain venues but genes are extremely powerful yeah why wouldn't they be right yeah absolutely I mean nurture matters as well are immensely powerful so and I think that that gives us hope you know people say well you know we're we're we should not be so hoty we should not be so arrogant you know we we have what uh 50% of the same uh chromosomes as a fruit flly you know like who are you to be and I 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 cuz 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 the word you know homo sapan which is our species and our genus um sapen doesn't mean it doesn't mean knowledge like science cenia means knowledge sapience means wisdom and I like to look atmology I'm fascinated by it but it kind of highlights what we should be doing and what what is it that we are aware of I mean I I'm curious have you ever encountered like why are we called 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 the one dies the 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 philosophical time perception it's that's exactly I'm an expert on happiness sitting here and and then Morgan howo is an expert on the relationship between psychological happiness and money sitting here and he described this uh cartoon which inevitably makes me chuckle of a guy and his dog sitting by a lake and the there's a bubble you know sort of bubbles coming out of the guy's head and and he's thinking about whatever his his stock portfolio and things back home Etc 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 modeling of time as you said before we can forecast we that's how we 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 uh to do what are called gunan or thought experiments Einstein said um to predict the future to model the future not really predict it 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 coration with causation ends up dying so it's very dangerous to it's very dangerous to do that uh but but the point is the notion of what's called confirmation bias is prevalent in every human being scientist or not and in fact as scientists you and I 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 FedEd maybe you went 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 some Force responsible for our Fates when when maybe it's random on I totally agree with you I'll play devil's advocate for a moment not for astrology per se but uh 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 um that within the eye of the fly the fruit fly that there are some Magneto receptors um so it turns out there are some humans that perform better than chance in a Magneto reception perceptual task yeah you know this is um very surprising to me it can be trained up somewhat but I'm sure there are a number of people hearing this that they M El 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 yeah so I think humans love the idea that there's something um skills or um uh qualities beyond our reflexive understanding that we all Harbor this idea that we have superpowers that we just need to tap into sixense you six sense or this person has a stroke and suddenly is speaking conversational French and therefore you know neuroplastic I ities you know Etc or what's it pro perception or um our colleague when you were at San Diego um R Chandra Ram yeah like um the synesthesia right certainly synesthesia exists people who will hear certain key on the piano and immediately evokes the the uh the perception of of a particular color not 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 might cross unusual crossmodal plasticity is what we would call it yeah but so could could that not be you know made into an argument well that means that there that this is a general feature that we just don't know how to access but maybe like we could go to the uh we could go to the gym and and you know mental gym or do something to enhance that like you said I don't know some people do that with like infrared near infrared wavelengths that they do some kind of training and they claim they can see certain things um the question is how useful is it and then how how predictive is it and I don't think that we can make a case for the you know predictive elements of the position as I said of Mars and Mercury being in retrograde as it is now like most but the thing that's shocking is that like look there's there's a whole page in almost every newspaper except the excur bable New York time no I'm just kidding that New York Times uh does still around they uh it's it's very interesting I'll tell you off the air recent recent uh encounter I've had with the New York Times but but um but most newspapers have more you know 10 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 are you know 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 200 12 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 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this month only January 2025 ag1 is giving away 10 free travel packs and a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 again go to drink a1.com huberman to claim the 10 free travel packs and a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 it speaks to what I think is one of the core functions of the human brain which you know uh umbrella is 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 well confirmation bias the ability for us to link a and t as opposed to a b c and work through things linearly and try and disprove our own hypothesis is much stronger than any um desire to work through things systematically unless you're trained as a scientist exactly Y and so it's no surprise to me that people um want to understand themselves and understand others in a way that uh feels at least semi-reliable and to do that in a way where they don't have to run a ton of experiments and uh hence hence astrology I'd like to um stay within this vein of thought but you said something earlier that's been kind of you know um nagging in the back of my brain you said we have two refracting telescopes in the front of our skull um I will often remind people that your retinas that line the back of your eyes like a 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 yeah 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 Etc that we wouldn't otherwise be able to perform right you could sense odors at a distance smoke Etc 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 in love with telescope since the you know age of about 12 when I could first afford one to buy one of my own and and that really came out of the fact that I recognize 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 where I don't know there's a street light outside it's is crazy let me look outside and see what it is and it was the moon and I had never seen it was near near moonet 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 sizes which is a great great uh Scrabble word if you're ever you know pressed for for a win in Scrabble use the word siy I think it's like 80 points um and that just means a conjunction an alignment of astronomical objects I was like what the hell is this this is 1984 Andrew you know you're younger than me but but Google did not exist for another 16 years and I 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 you know back then it's not a 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 what how am I going to find this out like imagine exist we're so blessed that we have the internet and we have these llms it's so easy now to be a scientists 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 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 was incredibly uh you know observant uh 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 you know was going by the planets on The Grand Tour of the solar system never been done before I was like I thought you needed a spaceship you know and and I realized that was my first bit of astronomical research you know 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 but I couldn't afford a telescope we were pretty modest means back then I had a job working at a delicate test in down the street and I 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 delicatessan in dobs Ferry and I ended up getting a telescope for $75 and I you know cherish this thing and and then I was like oh let me look at these things in the sky and it's pretty amazing uh I I don't know if you know the history of telescopes but the first ones were invented because of uh the 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 was is very interesting because it would be like he he made the telescope but he never thought to look at the at the night sky with it he only used it as a spy glass to look at objects you know on the horizon or in a city or whatever he never went like this looked up you know 45 that required Galileo so he's my absolute hero of all of science we'll talk about him later maybe um 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 to use their eyes and back to TI brah Kepler cernus they had to use their eyes which are telescopes I'll get back to that don't worry um I I know you afford me the podcaster you know predilection of of going off on long tangents but I think this is good um 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 only things that moved first looked at the moon now take yourself back to 16009 when he was first looking at these objects 1609 there were no clocks there are no scientific tools of any any real virtue uh he in fact would invent many of these things there were simple things like a magnetic compass a slide rule which nobody you know known in your main demographic will not a slide rul is but that's okay um very simple tools um you know they would use tubes and whatnot but Galileo looked at the moon and the hypotheses 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 than center of the universe God is the center of the universe the Catholic Church held this and everything will go around the earth and in fact I I'm not going to challenge you because I I I I think you'll defeat me in this in this but in your audience there 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 is the uh 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 arist darkus did you know 2,000 years ago but this is knowledge we've had for two as I said 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 uh 10 years ago it was the 100th anniversary of Einstein's theory of general relativity and they 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 and 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 it's not 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 um but this notion that you could do observations that you could use a scientific tool couple 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 was 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 iPie is close to your eye and he was able to magnify things about 3 to 10 times pretty easily can you explain refraction for people that that yeah are not when light light is the light travels at the fastest speed um of any entity you know photons travel at uh roughly 300,000 kilometers per second uh except when they go into a medium that's what they travel in in in the vacuum of space or in a vacuum in my laboratory or whatever but when they go into a medium that's uh transparent or translucent uh they slow down the you can you can think of it as the light waves themselves imagine uh light waves as rows of soldiers marching together and then uh imagine that they're walking at an angle to to the beach here in 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 yber mate is so delicious we can't do it because it's it's got a little bit of cloud to it similar to for instance if you go and uh look at a fountain and you see a coin and you decide you know you're going to be that mischievous kid and you're going to grab that coin so you can throw it back in like any uh you can you can recycle the wish um and you reach down to grab it and you miss because where you see it is not where it actually is 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 dialectric or just a medium that's transparent or translucent and uh 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 t 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 Galia 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 I'm going to pause you for one second and I please um earmark where you're at because um I have a number of questions that I just can't resist asking fine first of all if it's too lengthy an answer feel free to say you know pass but uh why was the best glass in um in Holland what what is it about the Dutch and and good glass I think that they were extremely as they are now I have great colleagues that are that are from the Netherlands um they were obsessed with with um high quality as as Germans are you know there very similar to Germans uh very uh into very precise instrumentation and high quality uh it's interesting to note that the uh that glasses were only really invented in some sense um because of the fact that there was an existing standard for human visual Acuity okay so we we all know we go to the eye eyasses ey glasses yeah so we know today that when you go to the eye doctor there's an eye chart right and we all SN it's called the Snelling chart SN chart when you go to the DMV they 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 let's just say high Acuity Vision we won't get into we won't get into yeah uh and if you can only read you know three lines down and then you're essentially um 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 bu there are many people driving in the United States by the way who qualify as legally blind because when you drive you mainly use your peripheral vision they are granted a driver's license this this should terrify everybody but all those ey charts every DMV here has the exact same size for the e at the top okay 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 the gudenberg Bible in front of people it's amazing to think about it because there's only like 10 copies of the gudenberg Bible still left they're all in vaults they're all worth hundreds of millions of dollars you you can't buy them even if you're you know Elon um 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 was 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 20 or you know 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 and instead of putting one on each eye he put one in front of the other one and then use that to construct a telescope he didn't 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 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 cernus 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 cernus about the math but it was cernus that um that gave us the first like trusted statement that the earth and the other planets rotate around the sun yeah he I would say he gave the hypothesis he wasn't he wasn't wrong Gallo didn't correct him it just Galileo brought evidence to the table he brought hard scientific observ who this cernus guy was he just sort of like a iconic class he's like hey how about we're not the center of the universe it's the sun that's the center of universe so what was the Milo of the time was that um the Earth was the center of the of the universe which was our solar system effectively was the whole universe they didn't know about stars and Galaxy certainly we can get into that later uh but there was what's known as the talic um 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 of the of the orbits of Planets For example I mentioned Mercury's retrograde and what 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 uh due to the fact that the Earth is we know now Ro rotating revolving around the Sun and rotating on its axis but the main effect is its revolution around the Sun and the other planets are to in the same plane the Zodiac plane the What's called the ecliptic due to the angular momentum of the Proto solar 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 scurve 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 and they must have known by modeling this stuff on Earth between objects on Earth and that raises for me anyway uh an important psychological question so you you've got um these Dutch folks with Great Glass yeah they're using that great glass to correct vision I should say uh sorry Andre the reason that they had good glass is they were the some of the foremost um uh uh explorers right a lot of the early uh trade and they were uh what did exploration give them access to trade so they could get the finest silicon and glass and they could make it themselves that's their economics again capitalism always wins right this is a lesson that we shouldn't forget their Commerce their economies allowed them to do trade and get acquire the best highest quality materials then that was used to make the best scientific equipment and it's just curious it' 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 hron collider or or slack or something like that and and then not using it you know just like using it to like measure slack is sitting empty right basically but it wasn't originally that's the point right it was used for something so I so I what I'm curious about is why do you think it is that some humans get some technology in this case glass yeah and they want to look at things that are very close up yeah you know that I'm I like microscopes a lot I I right now you know I don't have my wet lab we're still still involved in some clinical trials but you know I love microscopes and I love customizing my microscopes I didn't like them you know I don't like a plug-and playay I I 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 motorize stages Etc but what was I going to invest my money into it was higher numerical aperture yes better basically you're able to see things better right exactly see see smaller things better that that's what um numerical aperture will will do for you so it's like putting more um horsepower into a car yeah as opposed to paying more attention to the you know the the paint job people do that with their cameras you know they geek out everyone's got their thing yep 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 like I want to look at things really far away yeah you know and you're one of these humans I mean I Delight in the stars I Delight in the moon I have some questions about um that I think most people have who appreciate sunsets and moon sets and things like that um 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 am very I'm very interested in fish and and Aquatic Life and but I I like terrestrial things arboreal things things and trees and um and I think most people uh Orient to the uh the stuff that's more of this planet yeah what do you think it is I I realize you're not a psychologist and there's probably no um DSM whatever six diagnosis specific for this but but is I'll I 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 ladder I mean my my childhood was you know pretty tumultuous I think you and I have a lot things in common both fathers you know scientists and you know phys physics and math in my case um very hard driving very hard to live up to their their their Shadows that they cast for example um at least in my case um uh and and you seem to have a you know just a beautiful Rel ship with your dad now but I'm sure it wasn't always like that talked about that we did a lot of repair work and I'm very grateful for where we're at and and I encourage anyone son daughter mother father whatever relationship the the repair work to the extent that it's possible is absolutely worth it yeah and that episode you I texted you is a real gift not only you know for for all of us who got to you know witness it but also you know for grandchildren him you know his legacy and so forth and even you know his mom your your your your dad's uh wife and and your mom but but the the point is I yes it transported me I was living through after the divorce of my parents I lived with my stepfather um who had adopted us changed our names moveed 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 Michaelson who was the first Nobel Prize winner in American history um for what physics sorry Michael and Morley um he proved in some sense that the Earth is not moving through the ether you know that was hypothesized by by luminaries beforehand but but the point was when um when a child does a like solves a puzzle like you would think well like an adult you solve a Rubik's Cube okay I did it once I don't have to do it again but like my son keep doing it keep like showing off can I get it faster video game same thing once you solve the you don't just like 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 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 scientist you know 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 you know encounter something that you feel like no one has ever done before for example when I got my first telescope that night you know a couple of months after discovering this you I looked through it and I saw the same features on the moon and I have a 3D printed Moon that my son made you know to show you um and it has all the craters represented on it's so cool um and I saw the exact same craters on the moon that Galileo saw and then I looked at V at Jupiter and when you look at Jupiter you not only see these beautiful atmospheric bands on it and I brought you a telescope as your you know as your end of the year holiday gift uh it's yours to keep and no money uh no no money down and King brand for and uh and I looked at Jupiter and when you look at Jupiter as I hope you'll do tonight or with your crew later on um you will see not only the planet not only its little atmospheric Stripes maybe even the Great Red Spot which is 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 there 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 a m you know minimum storms when you say storms what are these stem they are enormous hurricanes on the planet and the equator bands like the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn so there's plenty of water up there that's raining down not water at all it's methane ammonia uh but it's a fluid so it behaves like a fluid doesn't so you have these swirling whirls and the 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 G 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 there's no other branch of science that's like that you can't look at the at the higs B on first of all no one person to team of 3,700 people that discovered the higs B on and seven people predicted the higs BOS on higs is just one of them one of my professors up around was another one Jer ground that he passed away unfortunately never won the no prize but but the point is you can't know what that felt like you can't know what it felt like to discover gravitation 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 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 they're called the Galilean moons of Jupiter and uh 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 have a list on my website Brian king.com I have a telescope buyer guide that I sent 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 it's an awesome feeling and I think that's what kept me going it distracted me from the the Pains of you know the life that I had at that time and you know just struggling as most pre-teens and teenagers did um you know but uh to answer your question that you asked 20 minutes ago it was really to to transport teleport exactly the opposite of the telescope I really felt like I was transported to these other worlds and I could that I could understand them with simple math and simple tools night after night they 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 it's incredible so it sounds to me like you were thank you for sharing that by the way the way it sounds like you were able to connect to places distant in space obviously yeah and time yeah Galileo that's beautiful I I don't think the same experience occurs when one looks down the microscope I it's true that the the greatest neurobiologist of all time by a long shot um was Ramon kahal right 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 kahal rsus cell there's a cell named after uh after him um you don't really feel a connection to him in the same way although that the neurons are beautiful but you don't it's not the same the way that you describe 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 that constellation is a democratic constellation oh you see that asteroid that's a rep no it's it's a 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 but for those moments we we as humans and you know this better than I do we need to we need recovery you can't just work out you don't work out seven days a week you work out six days a week or whatever it's still more than six more than I work out but but the point is we need to recover as much as we need to pay attention to to to the activity we need to recover pay attention to that too um and so the question is where can we recover from social media from politics from economic stress and all I think science is an ideal vehicle for it it should be apolitical we shouldn't be you know always concerned with you know politics or what's happening on social media and I'm guilty of this too I'm I'm you know certainly spending way too much time on screens but 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 3:00 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 and all these different you know quotidian things as I say we need to get back to that more more than ever I feel pondering the origins of life and connecting to people um who existed thousands of years before us that's right do you think that Galileo cernus um and others were 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 the position of the plets and and understand ourselves um for some other reason definitely yeah I mean Gallo in particular is sort of this tragic figure in some ways you know he 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 Rifts 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 uh the craters 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 out 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 you know when I saw those I was like oh cool it's next to some star until I realized I had to do more research that those are actually the moons of Jupiter so in one night tonight you can you know quadruple the number of moons you've ever seen in your life and some of those moons are almost the size of our moon arm moon is unusually large um and and those moons sometimes they'll cast Shadows on the planet so there'll be an eclipse you'll witness an eclipse on Jupiter on another planet with this $50 instrument or whatever okay um when he was observing these things he would would do things that were not only Psych iCal and they were therapeutic for him in his later years I'll explain that in a minute he ended up going blind and and so losing the sight you know kind of the Recollections that he had and he lost his daughter who was a nun because he was she was illegitimate as most of I think all of his kids except maybe one oldest one he had Mistresses he was never he was married divorced basically and I was kind of like he was Catholic in Italy Pro you know primordial Italy basically it didn't exist as a country but he was in Tuscany and uh he had a lot of challenges he was almost always broke broke even when he invented the his version of the telescope again he didn't invent the telescope but he made it so much better 10x it 20x it you know zero to one and it was incredible what he did with it he realized I this is great and all for me to discover these cool things and learn about the universe he was deeply religious too um but I got to make money I got to pay for my house he had like Bard imagine like your students at Stanford are living with you because that's the only way you can afford to pay rent in your I mean and you're cooking meals for them and they're like slobs right I mean like I was a slob in in college right so the point is he had bills to pay and he was a businessman he realized well look if I if I start making these telescopes everybody will see the things that I'm seeing I won't have any monopolistic advantage over you know Kepler who is his friend but also his competitor um they were they were you know really V vying for for who is the best astronomer of all time Kepler in Germany and and obviously Galo in Italy well become Italy and um 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 scientist but if he gave that it was like giving a you know 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 gonna I'm GNA sell them only to the government and they're going to pay me because these are great military devices and you don't 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 I'm not only going to like sell you these things first he went to the senate in in Venice the Venetian Senate the Doge the original Doge we think doge is a coin or some Department that elon's GNA head no no it was the Doge was like the the the the chief of the government back in the venetians which was one of the most wealthy countries in all of all of Europe it was separate from Tuscany and separate from Rome and he went there and he said uh you are a maritime Pro you have you ever been to Venice mhm it's beautiful right so he said look come with me I'm going to take you up into the Piaza 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 F35 you know stealth fighter and you you sell the rights to turn off the stealth portion of it to your adversary it's incredibly valuable it's a time portal yes you know you can tell I'm keep harping on this theme of you know the ability to see things at greater distance that's right uh at higher and higher resolution gives you a a window into time exactly and we that now that um has enormous Advantage there there because of you know the trajectory of the ship you actually are getting a a sort of crystal ball into the into what's going to happen later the future whereas looking at at position of the Stars some anticipation of of what's going to happen based on historical charts of the stars and we can speak of that now and I come to think of it as you're saying it light years what is a lightyear 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 we are always going to have this combination and this interrelation this this you know uh competition between things in space and things in time and he realized with this tube that he could see to Great distances that also afforded him this extra Advantage when it came to predicting the future as you say if we could do a top Contour survey of the greats of astronomy um where would it start starting with who people who got it wrong yeah and then we and then correct each other like we if we were going to do a fast uh a fast Sprint through these yeah uh 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 the 40 charting stars on the wall exactly we don't know who they are telling their their youngsters like okay you know because those stars are there relative to that Ridge or that Etc days are getting longer days are getting shorter that's right ergo hunt now Ergo collect stuff to hunker down um maybe even um don't reprodu now maybe even behavioral restraint 100% maybe reproduce now yeah yeah it's going to be much more you know optimal time for exactly so tens of thousands pre- Antiquity you would say then the I would say fast forward you know to the maybe uh Egyptian Epoch you know 5,000 BC so to speak when they had a also a very uh zodicalcandy that's I think it's less controversial Stonehenge than the pyramids the pyramids seem to be like almost you know they lead people into thinking about aliens and all what what do you think of is it I mean given their their mass given their location given what we knew about populations then 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 I I mean certainly I mean you'd have to convince me that people didn't build them but exactly how they built it is is is a great question I mean so for example I mentioned this when I was on Joe Rogan's show I said you know if you measure the bases of the pyramids it turns out that there a ratio of a cubit which is uh actually cubits not Quantum bits like you and your dad talked about but but uh cubits 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 makes it's sort of like uh models on Instagram right everyone's trying to attain these what's the standard that's right exactly wow so the phoh forearm is this and is this about carrying carrying items yeah well was just for length or like a foot we talk about a foot it was a Pharaoh's foot yeah that's where we get those from right so there was only kind of one rough standard for calibration which is incredibly important for removing systematic effects in science in general so you had a calibration standard now we have like a bar of platinum we've defined you know the second in terms of oscillations of a of a certain atom called cesium and how many times it Ates per per second sure a degree right yeah a calorie right so now we want to define those in terms of physical quantities not in terms of people um and so doing that has has been a great Advance forward 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 um 69,000 I 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 chubby around the middle yeah right bulg is because it's it's an oblate Spirit right exactly um and so all these things that were relics uh 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 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 the Great Pyramids of Giza they're all multip of a cubit uh times so many numbers of the number Pi so like but Pi wasn't known to them you know Pi wasn't known to be irrational until the Greeks um in uh in uclid proved that it was irrational um uh and that you know it didn't come from a computational it couldn't easily be obtained from it it had an infinite number of digits right so how did these Egyptians know that an alien told them no the way they did it is they laid it out they used a surveyor tool one of the surveyor tool is a stick with a on it so the wheel's a circle so you got so many multiples they just counted and that's how so we confuse a lot of things they stumbled into Pi 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 Stone engine was built nor how do I know how the pyramids were built um 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 likewise I'm not I'm not convinced it came from extraterrestrial I don't remember how we got on this but um so we were marching through so we were marching through um so we have the our ancient ancestors and then what point did we get to um kernus in Gala uh then it was uh yeah then it was cernus who had ideas but couldn't prove them he had no data to substantiate the capern or sun centered model of the universe which is also by the way you know almost everything in science is wrong right cernic is wrong the sun is not the center of the solar system right there there's 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 fosi so he belied that the 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 uh he was wrong when Einstein proved him wrong right so then you come up to um after him Kepler discovered the laws of the elliptical motion of planets and um and and their patterns that we still use we discovered an exoplanet my my colleague David Kipping I want to introduce you to to uh he's discovered exomoons 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 uh that only occur if the Earth is not the center of the solar system the rings of Saturn he he had Notions about those he accidentally discovered the planet Neptune it's amazing um and then he uh 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 t uh Earth centered cosmology then uh soon after that uh astronomers measured things like the speed of light um using eclipses of the moons of Jupiter uh they measured distances to Saturn they 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 uh William hersel and his uh sister Caroline hsel was the first uh female astronomer first female scientist she was the first person to use the scientific method did and become a fellow of the Royal Society in in Great Britain um and then later off after that we come to the era of the the last you know kind of U 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 uh got really short shrift um people discovered how Fusion works in the sun women Carol um g gapas spaan at Harvard and then Henrietta levit um who who measured this relationship between the size and brightness of objects called seiad variables that Hubble then used to make his law that proved that the universe is expanding and then after that people like penes and Wilson discovering the uh microwave and radio astronomy Robert jansky all the way up until you know my colleagues today some of them I've interviewed um Adam Ree and and Brian Schmidt and uh Barry barish he wrote the forward to my my second book um detecting gravitational waves the accelerating expansion of the universe due to Dark Energy first Nobel Prize in astronomy 2011 uh followed up 2015 discovery of 2017 discovered gravitational waves from inspiring black hole you know there's so many and there's so many you I've been 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 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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 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 uh came together and then uh at some point there was water and at some point there were Critters that moved and then multicellular organisms like what am I missing here I mean I'm I'm a I'm a 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 um it's so hard maybe I'm just not smart enough to comprehend this idea that a bunch a star exploded dot dot dot and here we are I think it's obvious why 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 of things scientifically and as I said before the Scientific Method as we practice it is based on you know hypothesis observation experimentation iteration right well think about this if I study if I have a hypothesis that um you know that certain people can um 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 I want to pack 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 you weren't around at the creation you know the design meeting for human beings I wasn't consulted at the design phas and by the way when Brian says pcking packing 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 is isid not just not good it's bad it's it's it's cheating of a uh it's not making up data but it's tweaking the experimental design um 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 weo ens won the Nobel prize in economics in 2021 and he's done tremendous amount of work in this and you know confounding variables pcking where do these things manifest themselves in physics well high temperature super conductors this goes back to the late 80 I remember graduating from high school there was a discovery of room temperature what's called cold fusion that was one thing that create also Limitless energy too cheap to meter from just using hydrogen and from seawater and Palladium uh and platinum um that turned 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 pcking which may not have been maliciously intended but the goal the output of it is certainly you know a driving in that influences people to do things that are unethical and and that happens at all levels and we we saw I saw it in my own experiment um 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 because I think I can I can help that plate still spinning in the backgound like a planet it's spinning like our solar system right uh but the um the the the Quarry was so big to unravel what caused the Big Bang to what ignited the spark that became our universe it's at least it was called when we announced the Discovery at Harvard um on on uh St Patrick's Day 2014 uh world news covered a front page everywhere New York Times Sienna every single outlet covered it it was called one of the greatest discoveries of all time not only did it uh 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 heard on the joog exactly right that's right among many things that we hear about only on that show so the the point is um it was 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 mon that you and your father seem to have had and that's great um we always had kind of a difficult relationship as I said he abandoned me in my book I write about this rather um he abanded me and my older brother Kevin at I was seven he was 10 and he you know just left us and because of that he didn't end up you know paying child support for me or my my brother and alimony to my mother and so my stepfather adopted us and my last name was originally not keing it was axe ax um and so uh when we adopted I never saw him I didn't see him for 15 years but I knew one thing he was uh a brilliant scientist and he was actually the youngest he was he was not only a 10e professor he was full Professor with like a chair at Cornell at age 26 so you and I got our professor like our 30s or whatever I was 40 when I got tenure yeah I mean it's it's like a much he was 26 2 it was a math it was a little bit different 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 PR um a remarkable scientist got into incredible discoveries in mathematics and physics and I knew one thing he never won the Noble Prize so as some kids might compete with their father who's a you know captain of the high school football team and they want to be the captain of the college foot very competitive boys can be competitive with their Dads right you know that and I want to compete with him but he wasn't an athlete I wasn't an athlete I can compete with him and do what he could not do which was win a Nobel Prize and I was arange 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 Pro I'm not 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 prize that's all I have to do quote unquote how hard can it be there's been hundreds of Nobel prizes given out these that's the way you thought about I was at Stanford and you're surrounded by Noble you know what it's like I was a postto at Stanford uh for a short time we can get into that and uh and 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 element 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 uh to be uh a phenomenon called inflation which was co-created by uh uh at least three scientists but but two of whom were at Stanford associate with Stanford Alan Guth who's now at MIT he was a postto at slack and Andre Lind who's a you know renowned professor at at Stanford to this day so uh they predicted that there was this mysterious substance called a Quantum field and that the fluctuations in this Quantum field existing in a four-dimensional Infinite Space uh the random fluctuations of a Quantum field NE 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 uh an expansion of that four-dimensional space locally and that occurred at a specific time when you say four-dimensional space can you toss the axis of that space so you can think of as ordinary threedimensional space but imagine uh X Y and Z extend to Infinity in all directions and we're sitting at our local uh 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 uh that's because the universe has been expanding in addition to having existed for 14 billion years it's been expanding for for that uh an additional power of three times that um 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 in this landscape of of what we call the cosmos but it wasn't limited to just our what we now see is our universe we have a horizon just like if you go off in to the Pacific Ocean here away from Land uh you see a horizon it's a circular Horizon in all directions so we live on a threedimensional planet right the Horizon is two- dimensional it's it's one dimensional Circle uh that we can see any ship that's above the Horizon we can see visible light coming from it right but we 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 they indirect methods can talk about that different time so there's a horizon on a three-dimensional surface that's a onedimensional surface in four dimensions it's a two-dimensional surface so you kind of lose two dimensions and that means it's a sphere it looks like 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 we go farther than back you see this primordial heat that's left over from the formation of the elements that's called The Cosmic micro background radiation that's what I study its properties and what it reveals it's the oldest light in the universe the oldest possible light it was once visible you could see it if you existed uh but nobody existed back then um and it originates from the formation of the lightest elements and the 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 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 you know spoiler alert my first book is called losing the Nobel Prize because we had a retracted discovery that we made at Harvard on on uh St Patrick's Day 2014 10 years ago so you had a paper that essentially um LED you to the like realistic possibility that you might win the Nobel Prize and then you and then you had to retract it um do you recall your state of emotional state or state of mind when you realize that you were wrong very clear and that's that's how it relates to this packing and everything um we actually didn't have this paper peer reviewed we were so concerned that a competitor uh which is a spacecraft a billion dollar spacecraft we were just A1 million Doll Experiment a little telescope at the South Pole Antarctica where I've been a couple times and that instrument bested a scientific telescope led by thousand people costing a billion dollars Led Out of You Know multiple countries in America and Europe and we were terrified as many scientists are that we're going to get scooped in fact the the original discovery of the cosmic microwave background was made by accident the discovery of this 3 Kelvin heat Source that's coming to us in all directions IAT 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 a communication so they stumbled on it they accidentally said I'm looking at the satellite that should have a certain amount of uh 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 um 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 3 degrees above absolute zero 3 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 acids 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 preber dad Arthur cornberg RNA uh son um you know structure of RNA so you publish a paper that wasn't peer-reviewed because you were worried about getting scooped scooped is when someone else beats you to publication um folks and um gets credit for the discovery it's a whole discussion that we could have some other time if we we just want to Riff on the process of science but um so you published the paper yeah we didn't publish it we we submitted it to the archive we had a press conference at Harvard Center for astrophysics and and uh space sciences and uh and it was televised and in the audience were Nobel laurates and and reporters but the discovery that you know 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 build so the first one I invented when I was a postto at Stanford it was called bicep and it stood for background imager of cosmic extragalactic polarization and it's also kind of a play on words because the pattern of microwave polarization which we can talk about uh was a twisting curling uh pattern so I made the pun like curl like you do bicep the muscle behind curls anyway it's not that funny and and they ended up trying to change the acronym which pissed me off but uh but anyway uh the the the tragic thing is that um we built this experiment we upgraded this experiment it's very hard to get money uh to build it I got money from David Baltimore who's the president of Caltech uh I should say I was at Stanford I should say about David Baltimore just because people might want to go to uh former president of Cal Tech maybe still Rockefeller no former president of the Rockefeller that's an interesting story um if you want to look it up you know look it up as they say scientists are are human um he landed at Caltech so they funded you to do this he gave me a special uh Grant just presidential this called Caltech presidence fund he gave it to me and my postto adviser Andrew Lang was incredible scientist he was married to Francis Arnold who won the Nobel Prize in in 2018 in chemistry renowned scientist uh as well and they were just power couple and he uh invited me to give a talk and I gave a job talk he hired me on the spot I couldn't you know help myself from saying yes before he finished this I was miserable at Stanford by the way it was 1999 2000. 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 5:00 a.m. you know I couldn't sleep more than four four or 5 hours and I I just said yes moved 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 the only University that would fund it was this this gift from David Baltimore's presidential fund so these confidence of events and by the way then because I had this job and because I built this telescope with my colleagues I got the job at UCSD which then enabled me to meet my wife so let me uh incredible story you move down to Caltech which is in Pasadena amazing place and then you get the money how much was this initial one was a million dollars to build a first version okay that's quite a quite a gift for a postto um million bucks you 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 um but it sounds like you have uh good feelings about the experience nonetheless so be 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 celebra 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 it's fine um 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 best of them but one evaluates um themselves relative to like their family lineage sometimes it's a grandfather this thing of having some um internal friction in order to live up to something yeah sounds like that was driving you when Tiger Woods and another Standford right same same story but father hard pushing driving and then what does he do after he you know is a PGA Champion he wants to like become a Navy SEAL or something like he was hanging out with a lot of seal it wasn't enough for him um so I sorry I interrupted your question so at the point where you made this discovery were you were you feeling like all right check that box um 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 you know my brother always says you know baggage has handles so you can put it down nice so that like Journey from initiating it um the experiment um 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 I could see how you banded me I was only seven I'm kind of boring you know he used to joke I only care about kids once they learn calculus he a you what a cruel thing to say he would say it in just and and it is true we did reunite and we did have a reproach M 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 is 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 you get a doover you get to kind of correct the mistakes or the ways that you would 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 will'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 it as I said it no longer served me and but the 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 you know partially that led to me actually being kind of kicked out of the leadership of the experiment and and that was precipitated by a truly tragic event so I told you my adviser Sarah Church um and you know set up a job interview for me with her adviser when she was a postu at Caltech named Andrew Lang Andrew was like a c at that time I was a stranger my dad he was like a father figure he was like you know like you ever see the the TV show madman like dondre 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 she won the Nobel Prize a few years ago and um 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 I'm not sure so much good stuff going on up there but but uh there's this 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 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 postto getting a tenure track position those are all finite games right um and the ultimate what's the ultimate finite game and Nobel Prize because only three people can win it each year there's only 200 people have ever won it you know there's more people in the NBA than have won it in physics right so this is an very exclusive club and if you know if you win it somebody else isn't going to win it right like odds are and this pressure to kind of get to that level uh 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 fan would say um 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'm emotional thinking about this when Andrew um was at the peak of his life um he chose to take it he took his own life he killed himself he killed himself ironically tragically he used helium which is uh you know Central to the formation of the universe and the creation of our universe is rying in a large part on helium the abundance of and he affixiated himself in a in a cheap dirty sleazy Motel actually I had stayed at in Pasadena when I was visiting him for my initial job talk can I do you mind if we we um go into this a bit I realize it's a it's a painful memory and I I feel it um you know not to shift the the focus but ironically my all three of my academic advisers Dead first one shot himself in a bathtub uh two weeks after we celebrated uh something for him just like like you know suicide is such a peculiar thing um he did it for very different reasons different stage of life let's get back to to Lang um how old was he he's 41 I think so he's young um had three kids three three son wife still alive yeah Francis still you know renowned Professor was she shocked they were separated they had gotten estranged and um they weren't living together it was interesting he was always very close she had two children I think from previous marriage or one child from a previous marriage um and he was like a father to that son as well like a biological father or whatever that means um kids were so dedicated to him and look don't cry for me I mean I I I still emotional because he meant so much to me as as a mentor as a friend as an adviser as as you know a father figure basically but he had real kids and he had you know adopted kids and it was tragic for everyone suicide is such a peculiar thing because it in some sense it can um quote unquote make sense for if somebody we know is very depressed or they have a terminal illness you know you know and and but sounds like it came as a bit of a surprise do do you think that the um sometimes there's this close relationship between genius and um let's just say not mentally healthy um that you know even what you mentioned before you know like we have to try this experiment I mean there's a bit of recklessness to that when when dealing with millions and millions of dollars and postto careers and you know that there's a I mean the Delight of a fun experiment and an adventurous experiment maybe as a like a a project where you kind of weigh into it a little bit to see but that's very different than like we have to do this there's a risk-taking element there that that supersedes kind of my Notions of like what what an adviser's job is which is to make sure that people progress toward um to Sure Discovery but also like you want some um 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 like we're not going to implode or explode here and and he was a he was a pragmatist he would give me advice life advice you know and again I was a strange from my father he was playing this role and he he was just so he was Charming I he handsome charismatic he had just discovered you know came off this discovery of proving that the Universe uh has a 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 uclid 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 um perhaps I mean who knows um perhaps he committed suicide because he was um at a at a Peak you know one of the things that people talk about is the the peak and trough of dopamine you mention infinite games you know that I I said many times before that um it's very important that you not get fast large amplitude increases in dopamine that are not preceded by effort yeah you methamphetamine will give you a large amplitude um you know fast increase in dopamine but it the there's zero effort involved except to procure it and it sinks you into a post dopaminergic Peak trough at afterwards that um will have you uh hanging on for for the will to live um so what comes up goes down and it often goes down further than it went up when we're talking about dope I mean playing an infinite game is great because it's in the it's in the the motivation to for answers it sounds like he like hit a peak and you you wonder if maybe he was like okay now I'm going to check out now it's going to be hard to keep doing this I don't think it's explicable I don't I don't think you I mean the human brain is the most complicated thing on you know that human brains can even contemplate right it's solipsistic in in a sense but I I couldn't really wait into it I mean I know details of his personal life and yes divorce and separation and and so forth but but um I I don't think I don't think that's it just because the the highs of the new Quest and like the dopamine hadn't really come in from bicep and it wouldn't come in for four more years after his death in 20110 so you got to continue the project we got to continue the project but because he was removed and he was kind of my you know conly you know whatever I was to him I forget what how the relationship goes I'm not as conversing with the mafia as I should be but but with Andrew with his death one of the you know trivial in comparison consequences was that the main Patron and Backer of me in my career who would you know helped me get my job at UCSD had helped me get you know this this presidential career Grant which I received from President Bush and all these incredible accomplishments and just been my sounding board and experiments and kept me going and helped me when I had troubles with my graduates with students and he would talk to my I mean it's unheard of right the this compassion that this man had and if he had only reached out to 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 I went to the motel where he took his life when I was writing my book just to put me back and like try how could I comprehend it I I couldn't I just cried I sat in front of the hotel and I cried but but no I I don't think we can understand it but but the eventual High wouldn't come and then a much more crashing low after we essentially had a retri it and were 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 the South Pole how do you get to the South Pole you fly to Chile and then you and then you you ride a bicycle you know I never had the the physique to get into the military although I wanted to at one point to be a pilot actually I wanted to go to the Air Force Academy like my stepfather did but um but I didn't have the the phys I didn't have the hlp diet back then uh but the point was um you go on a military it's a whole way and you do it in seven days eight days if you're lucky sometimes it can take three weeks due to the weather down there it's the most violent weather most uh winds turbulence everything you know hostile but it's a cakewalk compared to the Explorer Shackleton um or Scott and um of course aminon so the quest to get to the South Pole first which is South Pole I should say for people that aren't familiar Antarctica is the seventh continent it's 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 the continents in the northern hemisphere you needed a massive counterweight in the southern it's so stupid but anyway it wasn't discovered till 1900s that 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 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 uh Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 missions right so getting there and setting that bar right and and making that accomplishment sometimes that's the extent of it like when you have the dopamine head of of being the first to get somewhere Scott was a British scientist and an Explorer and amonson was just an Explorer amonson roll amonson he tried to get to the North Pole first he lost somebody else beat him and he said uh well I'm going to keep going with this skis and sled dog team that I have and he literally went to the South Pole 180 degrees around so the the poles are the two end points of the Earth's axis of rotation there's a North Pole uh there's no land there there's no continent there there's ice there and S Santa is there exactly right uh 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 um it's just rocks right so if you drill under the ice in Antarctica you come to a continent and that's a difference between uh the North and South Poles but the South Pole is uh 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 toe South there's no other way to go and you come to the continental shelf the coastline is called McMurdo Station which was just you know basically there's some seal lines there and that's it and orcas and Penguins and and nothing else at that time now there's a whole research station and and then they got on skis and skied up 9,000 fet from sea level to 9,000 ft where the polar Plateau flattens out and they got to the South Pole and amonson got there 3 weeks before Scott and Scott was this British you know naturalist and like a Darwin but 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 and 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 a ski up them like he would find it and he's like I'm not coming back the same way that he got there because of the wind patterns and stuff so he knew he'd never 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 uh the Norwegian team ammson was Norwegian and they used sled dogs for two reasons one they conserve calories they uh provided propulsion and then they provided a tasty snack once you got to the South Pole because once you get South Pole you can ski downhill 9,000 feet you know to sea level basically and so they ate British would refuse to do that so they they knew they couldn't eat their dogs and they had dogs but they they wouldn't eat them so they were the sled dongs and when they got to the South Pole they came within uh 3 or 4 kmet 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 100 you know 360 Degrees around okay it's most boring place on Earth literally and I've been there um he got within so you can see things really far away he got there he got within 3 kilometers and he saw something on the horizon he's like oh you know bleep right and was a Norwegian flag now can you imagine Neil Armstrong steps out of you know 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 that he said great God this is a a horrible place and all the more so for having reached it without the benefit of priority so the the king and queen they were depending on him to make the first you know for for man for you know King and country right the 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 10t I can no no they were right the Norwegians got there first and because he got there three weeks later in 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 uh about three weeks later or three months later in March so his body was later recovered and it was a you know wasn't reported back to England for another six months uh so they gave their lives for for science for Discovery and to come up short to be second it must have been the most crushing defeat in history W 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 uh first you go to um Christ Church New Zealand we go to Auckland LAX Auckland Auckland to Christ Church and then uh the US uh has a charter with the New Zealand Air Force and we give them C130 cargo planes or C we have our own c17 cargo planes the jet powered ones unfortunately I got the c130s which is a four prop plane and uh I was on a plane that um that had the entire winter a summer Supply sorry the entire winter supply of bananas on this cargo plane which is as big as room this 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 till you realize there's no bathroom on the plane there's just a a literally a 5 gallon bucket and a and a shower curtain there are no windows on it cuz why do you know parat ERS need Windows and you know and uh and then there's enormous crates of bananas there 12 tons of bananas I have not touched a banana in 12 years because of that uh I not missing pottassium or whatever but but the point is you land on the coast and then um 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 other we export the F35 other car this is a strategic asset that we will not hard to get to it's very difficult so why South Pole y um and does this take us into the realm of light pollution yeah right I mean when I look up at the at the starry night um here in Los Angeles even though I'm T sort of back towards the Eastern Hills yeah um I'm I don't live at the coast um I can see some pretty impressive Stars not as uh impressive as when I highly recommend people get up to the yosd High Country in the in the month of August you can catch some great meteor showers it's an amazing place to begin with um you had the meteor showers and you're you're transported to another place yeah um and there's a lot of light pollution from cities yeah and it travels very very far so I'm guessing you're down the South Pole because there's a less light pollution you're right a slight uh deviation from that is uh 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 somewhere cold we want to be somewhere that's far away from you know man-made sources of RF interference and microwave interference and Communications obviously um but the South Pole has a couple of other properties one the sun is below the Horizon and the Sun is 5,7 500 Kelvin and we're looking for something that's a fraction of a Kelvin maybe a few Milli or nanokelvin 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 you know freezing is is 273 um so it 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 um but on the East Coast when I would grow up uh some days the bane of my existence would be you'd listen on the radio and they'd announce school closures uh due to snowfall in the winter and sometimes they'd say up you're out of luck because it's too cold to snow sometimes the the the air temperature cannot saturate and form precipitation and the South Pole is like that it's so cold that if you took this glass I'm holding a glass here and it was empty at on the table here and I extend this glass up to outer space the amount of water if I took all the water in the atmosphere the humidity in the atmosphere above the South Pole and condensed it into a liquid it would be A3 of a millimeter here in Los Angeles it's about an inch or you know 25 millimeters or more and so you'd like to not go there now why is that important well water absorbs microwaves and that's how your microwave oven works it heats up the water molecules they start to vibrate and jumble that causes friction they heat up and eventually they'll boil right so that's why sometimes you can you know overheat uh you know liquid in a microwave you can't tell but it's super hot and actually can be dangerous but in this case we don't want a photon coming from The Big Bang perhaps or before the Big Bang with the spark that ignited it we don't want that to travel for 14 billion years nearly and then get absorbed in a water molecule above the Earth's surface so the best place to go is space but space even with you know space I haven't done any scientific experiments but it's about a maybe a factor of a thousand to a million times more expensive so the same satellite that we were worried was going to scoop us was exactly a 100 or almost 200 times more expensive than our experiment at the South Pole yeah I was going to ask you about this a million dollars given to a postc that was the first trunch of funding we ended up getting about 10 million 10 million I mean even $10 million is a lot of money by any standard yeah but probably to my mind doesn't seem like enough money to to build a high- powerered telescope at the South Pole bring people there have the infrastructure I mean it's not like you're rolling this thing out onto the ice and and and just pointing at the sky I mean you need I mean I guess you could use the bucket from the plane as a bathroom but you need a number of things so um yeah you probably need hundreds of millions of dollars to build a a facility down at the south pole but those are all funded by by you and your and your listeners and and and so for the taxpayers so the National Science Foundation it operates those c130s are part of the National Science foundation's Fleet we don't pay a dime for them if I want to build a a computer network system down there we don't pay a dime for it it's actually a point of contention because now I'm no longer with that experiment I've I've you know recused myself from it uh for many years not because of the incident where we you know were basically disconfirming later disconfirmed our result right so you let the result out you do this news conference I want I do the news conference okay so big press conference big press conference it turns and you know fast forward some years it turns out this was not correct some months yeah only a few months well better to be corrected quickly than you know collect your Noel prize and have to like give it back or something right I I have to say and and um the pursuit of prizes is a complicated thing I was always discouraged from pursuing prizes all my advisers well my my graduate adviser was very pure in the sense that she just liked doing experiments I remember she was very very smart very smart is Barbara Barbara Chapman I mean when and and you know it's not just her pedigree that that um is evidence of that but since pedigree is something most people can um at least understand internally and externally I mean she was you know went to Harvard as an undergraduate then she was at UCSF and Caltech and she she um actually had a project sending zebra fish up into space looking at uh yeah uh looking at development of the vestibular system in the absence of gravity gravity wow and then um fixing these specimens and bringing them back um also did a lot of great work back on Earth but she wasn't somebody who was ambitious for ambition sake and um and my post adviser was exceedingly ambitious but he he also discouraged prizes and the pursuit of prizes that's the right way to be yeah I think that it's it's it's sort of like going into football to get a Super Bowl ring these things do represent the Pinnacle but um it's dangerous to be chasing that like singular carrot because you can miss the you missed the journey look I'm not proud of that I'm not proud that I had such a base venol you know kind of pursuit uh I think it was as I said compounded by psychological factors you know but did you have fun doing the work oh I loved it yeah I mean getting to do what I do now and now it's even even more exciting in a sense because the project you know and by the way it's not like we made a blunder and like you know Rob helpfully took the lens cap off the camera we didn't make a blunder like that there have been many many blunders and actually led to much worse retractions our results are stronger than ever I should say are the bicep team's results i' I've left the team as I said but their results are still the very best by almost in order of magnitude we hope with the Simons Observatory that I'm uh you know co-leading with with colleagues at Prince and pen and and other places that we can actually supersede them but we haven't yet uh and so what we saw I should be very clear we didn't make a blunder we didn't see like put our Thumb in front of the viewfinder you we didn't make something stupid we mistook a signal produced by another astrophysical source as representative of this curling pattern of microwaves for which bicep was named um that would be indicative if confirmed of the inflationary origin of the universe which by the way would be concomitant with the existence of the Multiverse so the stakes are really high that means the incentives to make sure you detect that are really high too and not get scooped as happened many many times my adviser was scooped he never won the Nobel my advisor's adviser he never won the Nobel Prize these accidentally discovered serendipitously discovered astronomers penzes and Wilson they did win the Nobel Prize um so there is a pressure on scientists to get there first like Falcon Scott Robert Scott getting to the South Pole first there is a benefit to Priority it's just a fact of Life and Science is no different you we teach undergraduates um about seven or eight different experiments all of them won the Nobel Prize at some point in physics history doesn't mean they're a going to win a Nobel Prize no why because they didn't get their first so getting their first and sign that For Better or For Worse is the sign of of greatest accomplishments the sinqua Nan of accomplishment is that that does lead to no prizes now but the goal is always I I have a motto which is you know go as fast as you carefully can yeah um but sounds like you were wrong for the right reasons meaning no one made up data you were there was a confound that you weren't aware of you became aware of it yeah I should say what we saw we what we mistook as the imperator of this origin spark of the universe was the humblest substance in the universe namely dust so when a star explodes it produces after its lifetime as expired it fuses lighter elements into heavier elements eventually it gets to produce iron and iron is the the element for which once it's fused together from I think it's silicon or or two nuclei before it it um it produces too little energy to keep the star buoyant and expanded and so the star immediately starts to collapse when that collapse occurs it blasts out into the interstellar medium that surrounds it all the the byproducts the Silicon nitrogen oxygen hydrogen and the iron and it blasted out into the universe uh surounding it and that happens enough times in our galaxy that the Galaxy is actually pretty polluted place uh it's smoggy it's dusty it's dirty and the dust is actually little microscopic meteorites so on my website brian.com uh I give away actually I have a special link bring.com huberman uh I will uh give away actual meteorites that come from your ancestral homeland of Argentina and you'll see when you get them they're highly magnetic they're very dense and I give you the material uh the composition of these meteorites in the assay we do x-ray crystallography on them it's really cool the um the actual composition of them uh was uh is determined by this last event that a star does before it dies which is to produce iron so we did discover a microwave signal from the Galaxy not from the Big Bang not from the cosmos but from particular and unique to our galaxy which is that when a star explodes it produces this material mostly made of iron these the microm meteorites that I talked about put on my website for your listeners and this um these micrometeorites are also going to act like little Compass needles they're highly magnetically susceptible so the Milky Way everything in the universe has a magnetic field you have a magnetic field birds have it um you know even magnet bacteria can have it and our planet obviously has it and the galaxy has it what happens when you put a compass in a magnetic field those needles get aligned with the magnetic field that then produces a type of polarization now polarization is the least familiar light has three characteristics its intensity its color or spectrum and its polarization almost nobody knows what polarization is but it's really the essence of what makes light a wave if you think about an ocean wave the ocean wave is going up and down undulating up and down and the undulation the direction perpendicular to the Sea surface is it sort of its polarization happens to be the water waves are actually polarized longitudinally but forget that or if you and I separated by a meter and a half 2 met we have rope between us if we oscillate that rope up and down at a certain frequency the frequency will be the Spectrum the color of the light the how hard we do that would be the intensity of the light and the plane that we're oscillating the jump rope or whatever that's the plane of polarization these little needles of cosmic dust from the exploded um inter inerts of a star that died to you know in our galaxy many years ago and many many billions of these Stars uh they produce these these particles of dust so we saw that pattern instead of seeing being the birth pangs of the Big Bang the origin of the universe I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors Roa Roa makes eyeglasses and sunglasses that are of the absolute highest quality I've been wearing Roa readers and sunglasses for years now and I love them they're lightweight they 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as it gets dark outside and I've noticed a much easier transition to sleep which makes sense based on everything we know about how filtering out shortwave lengths of light can allow your brain to function correctly Roa red lens glasses also look cool frankly you can wear them out to dinner or to concerts or out with friends so it turns out it is indeed possible to support your biology to be scientific about it and to remain social after all if you'd like to try Roa go to roka.com that's r.com and enter the code huberman to save 20% off your first order again that's r.com and enter the code huberman at checkout so I want to talk about what you're working on now before I do that yeah right mini segue there are a number of questions that I have that some of which I sort of know the answers to most of which I don't know the answers to but I think a lot of people either wonder about or if they don't they can quickly enrich their experience of daily life if we were to get answers on the following so I'm thinking about this not rapid fire Q&A but maybe like one to three minute answers about the following for instance why does the Moon look so much bigger when it's near the Horizon as opposed to uh overhead yeah my son asked me that two days ago so that's a fun one so uh let's go first with that sometimes the Moon is huge sometimes the Moon is small um and I'm not talking about when it's full versus a sliver right um tell us why so the Moon is always a half a degree wide same exact apparent angular diameter as the sun which is unique among the 290 moons in our solar system only our moon has the same apparent diameter as seen from its Planet as the sun does meaning we're the only planet that can have a total solar eclipse an exact total solar eclipse like we had a couple a months ago in Austin Texas and elsewhere um be that as it may the moon doesn't change in size um I would hope not that that would freak me out yeah uh the Moon is uh is about 60 times the Earth's radius from the earth it's 250,000 miles away which is about one and a half light seconds away uh and it is about the size of the continental US in in uh diameter so uh or a little bit less so the uh the moon's size doesn't change but when the human eye has something to compare it to the the the brain has a reference point to compare it to and because it's so big if there's something in front of it a 747 a um a a person uh a large building even when you were if the moon is behind that object because it's so far away moving even the Earth's entire radius doesn't change the moon's apparent angular diameter it's the same in P King as it is here Beijing as it is in Los Angeles right so that means a very small a very large change in the distance in the Earth would change the building size dramatically it could reduce it to zero basically but when you compare it to something that lands close on the horizon your brain has something visually to compare it to when it's overhead Zenith or whatever it doesn't have anything to compare it to so you're just looking at it but you can always measure it and you can prove to yourself it's always the same size it's about the size of your pinky fingernail held at arms length same size as the sun and interestingly enough it's you said one degree it's half a degree half a degree degree oh that's why you said pinky so folks um most people probably aren't familiar with thinking in degrees if you want to understand a degree put your uh right or left doesn't matter um arm out in front of you raise your thumb like a thumbs up so at the the width of your thumb at at arms length is approximately one degree that's why you say for your pinky it's about half a degree I should also say and this is an opportunity to give a a fun little lesson in visual Acuity if I were to draw um 30 black lines spaced from one another with the just the the uh light color of your nail in between them uh we'd say they were 60 lines you know black nail black you know alternating um your Acuity for 2020 vision is approximately 60 cycles per degree yes a hawk any kind of raptor is about 120 cycles per degree which is why they can sit up on a lamp post and actually see the the rustling of the of the grass below and probably make out some of the individual Furs on the on the head of a rodent but you can't so you um so what do I mean by 60 cycles per degree if if if I were to draw um 40 black lines so now you have 80 total of black and then the color of the nail black then the color of the so you would see that as believe it or not as solid black right it's it's uh you don't have it's beyond your Acuity threshold when you say one degree so this is important so so when the moon is is quote unquote giant at the Horizon put out your pinky it covers the moon you can eclipse the moon right you can eclipse the moon when the moon is overhead you can eclipse the moon with your pinky and most people thinking no way that can't be true but it's absolutely true fun fact uh which is bigger the uh width of a rainbow or the width of the Moon and is a rainbow wider than a half a degree you ever seen a rainbow you can visual I mean in the sky it seems as I'm not talking about the arc the band thick from red to blue from Red ro ro Biv yeah what's bigger gosh intuitively I want to say it's thicker but now you're going to tell me that it can't be because it's um this is like the the pink Floyd album right this is literally just the the the polar Side of Moon the dark side of the moon the rainbow coming through when you take light and pass it through pris um I'm gonna say it's one it's one degree uh so the rainbow's bigger uh no the the moon's bigger it seems like roughly the same size but I when I think of a r i just think of like the it's the same size it's the size of the sun which question thank you very much there you go Professor FES the the test for once yeah um okay next question people obsess over this I have my theories I think it's still debated when you watch a sunset you get that beautiful long wavelength short wavelength contrast that I blab about incessantly on the podcast and social media because that's what setting your circadian clock it's that orange red tones and the blue tones of the sky but right as the sun goes down across the Horizon especially over the ocean there is the phenomenon known as the Green Flash yes what is the basis for the Green Flash well I'll tell you something really cool if you go to the South Pole which is over subscribed by a factor of 10 to one you believe 10 times as many people want to spend their nine Monon year of their nine months of their year minimum at the South Pole than we have room for to actually do work at the South Paul's car which means 10 people total no there's 45 people there just kidding just kidding and they're all listening to you half the time um so um when you want to go there when you do go there they actually don't know where the Sun is going to set remember the Sun only Rises and sets once a year right so it's one day and one night per year six months long um where the sun sets is unknown and and actually the days preceding it the sun is making a big circle around your head I've seen this with the moon so the Sun and the Moon they just make a circle and slowly after reaching their Apex on the first day of summer which is December 21st for them down there upside in eventually it crosses the Horizon on March on March 21st around March 21st that's the first day of fall or when they start getting ready for winter they don't know where it's going to go down we think of it always going to the west but where is West at the South Pole every direction you look is North okay uh so when this uh occurs the actual phenomenon that you mentioned the Green Flash can last for days or can last for hours so if you really are an afficionado of huberman protocols and you want to see the Green Flash apply to be down there but the bad news is you're stuck there for nine more months okay um so yes it's a real phenomenon not only can you take pictures of it but you you can see it uh with your eye uh the cor only correction I would say is you pretty much need to have a perfectly clear day you can't have any clouds on the horizon um and it's best seen over the ocean so we're blessed here but for those of us that don't end up at the South Pole yeah God willing um send me pictures like I don't like environment Z really kill it um but uh but if I watch the sun set over the Pacific or or um I see the Green Flash sometimes uh what's the basis of that yeah so the Earth's atmosphere is actually a um it's it's layered okay but it's actually simpler to think about the Earth as being flat now there's no hopefully there's no flers out there thinking that Brian keing is a is advocating the Flat Earth but imagine this table we're looking at a table imagine there's a slab of you know translucent glass on it and we're sitting at the on the table underneath the slab of glass pretty thick glass right and you're looking straight up you look through a minimum amount of the glass right straight up would be Zenith at your local Horizon every direction you're looking is your Horizon you see off the edge of this Flat Earth in this uh in this analogy um when you look at a slight angle you're going through more path length of the substr of the substance more glass finally if you did have this thing extending to Infinity you'd be looking through an infinite amount of atmosphere or glass when you're tangent to the Horizon when you're going parallel to the Earth's surface and this Flat Earth analogy uh the earth atmosphere is not only made of oxygen it actually has a lot of particulat and be it's because of those particulates a lot of them come from dust and and uh a lot of them come from you know volcanoes and and and a large amount now comes from human-made uh sources pollution and so forth the more Optical depth the more path length that you look through the more scattering of the Sun's light occurs when scattering occurs the longer wavelength light is e more easily penetrates through dust smog particles even glass okay so that goes through easier and the short wavelengths comparable to the intermolecular spacing of the smog the dust the gas in the atmosphere the oxygen scatters much more efficiently and so that gets scattered out of the beam of light from the sun the Sun's light though actually Peaks slightly in the green we don't actually notice this because our eyes are and we're used to thinking of it as very yellow um it happen and this the reason for this can be you know substantiated by U night vision glasses what color is the light coming in it's green right they amplify versions of these things why because your eye is very sensitive to Green Light it's even more sensitive to Green Light than yellow light so and that's because the sun which is what we've evolved to adapt to being most sensitive to sunlight is more greenish than yellow so there's more power at the wavelength like somewhere between like 450 and 550 nanometers exactly 100% right um so at that green flash at that moment of Green Flash you're seeing two things one is the sensitivity of the human eyes slightly ma maximized to that but that doesn't explain why photographs see it as well and the other reason is that most of the yellow light and the sunlight is getting scattered away and so you're mainly seeing that green light but you're only seeing it at the point of Maximum scattering which occurs exactly when the sun crosses the Horizon because of the interaction with all that atmospheric dust y that's wild because for the longest time I had a biological explanation for this that I think was based on a paper that was published maybe in nature but don't quote me on that um just because published in nature doesn't mean it's wrong there's I've Got Friends with a few nature editors still um and a great Journal look amazing we talk we do a whole episode about nature nature science and cell but the um the explanation that was getting kicked around for a while was a biological explanation which is that our ability to perceive Reds and greens and blues and yellows is based on our trichromacy the presence of these three different photo receptors short medium and long wavelength or you know green red so to speak that absorb short medium or long wavelength light and then the comparison there's this opponency um whereby our ability to see red is really contention on our ability to perceive green and so what like for a for someone who's red green color blind one in 80 males for instance they still see stuff out in the world that's red but they see as more orangish or brown ah okay dogs the same way right they're not colorblind true monochromats that don't see are very rare that is a one form AC I think it's called AC chromates yeah um don't quote me on that either but in any case the the idea was that if you're looking at something that's very enriched in Long wavelengths like orange red and you stare at it for long enough have you ever done that like American flag uh visual optical illusion when you stare at it then you look away from it and you see the opposite colors right and so one biological explanation is that the the Sun is setting and you're looking at this orange red thing when the sun is low in the sky you can actually look at it without um distressing your eyes right because right um as opposed to overhead when you should never stare at the Sun and then the moment that that reddish orange disappears The the biological explanation is that there's a a kind of perception of a green flash yeah because of the opponent seeing the switch to the other let's just say wavelength channel so to speak I don't think that's in disagreement I think that might explain the amplification that we see but then it doesn't explain why you'd see it in a photographic emulsion right there's nothing biological about it I like your explanation better because it's explained by uh by real physics and and the biology of color opponency is also physics but um but not as well worked out yeah okay cool earlier we were talking about the perceived relationship between the menstrual cycle which is not always 28 days but is on average 28 days and the lunar cycle is there any evidence that um well it'd be amazing if one influence the other in the in the other direction that the menstrual cycles were influencing the lunar cycle but is there any evidence uh between for a true relationship between the lunar cycle and the menstrual cycle that's been documented I don't know uh it's interesting The Sun Also produces tides and produces gravitational effect um but the dominant effect on Earth due to that 28 day 29 day cycle of the moon is its effect on the Earth's oceans which produces four Tides a day too high and too low and actually Galileo incorrectly used that phenomenon as a way to butress his argument that the Earth went around the sun he basically if you're listening I'm taking my glass of MAA yante yeah so he said that when the earth is spinning it rotates once per day but it's also revolving around the Sun so these combined motions make this sloshing of the liquid you see that and he claimed that is what caused the tides on the earth and the fact that's completely wrong it's amazing Andrew and you think about how brilliant a scientists can be and it's almost like the proportion of their blunder is proportionate to how brilliant they are you know because it it also correlates with the the the um height of the problems they're chasing exactly um you were you were saying that Galileo got certain things wrong but got a number of things right that's right Einstein too Newton too being wrong for the right reasons is actually very important in science for and by the right reasons I mean that nobody's you know pcking P value hacking or fudging data that they're not tossing data they're really trying to solve problems and you it's almost like in sports a great competitor wants great competitors yeah I mean what's the like why would somebody want to like cheat into a different weight class knock somebody out and consider themselves the world champion at that weight class like it's just it's silly it's it's and in science to not try and seek the truth is anti-science U certainly it happens but okay so no no clear evidence that the lunar cycle influences the the men I would expect that it would influence other animals I don't know what the menstral Cycles are you know deer or whatever you know who knows or or any animal that has you know an egg that you know well a lot of animals have not a menstrual cycle but an EST cycle so like a a lot of rodents have like a 4-day cycle okay um so it clearly doesn't map to the the lunar cycle but um you hear a lot about about these things and humans are amazing at drawing correlations it's a again we're a prediction making machine we're a storytelling machine and you know and in the past by the way the moon was a lot closer than it not a lot but it was closer the moon moves about the width of your again back to your fingers now so the moon moves Away by the the width of about your thumb's fingernail every year moves further away centimeter away from the earth because there's a gravitational competition between the gravitational force of the moon and the Earth's oceans provide a source of friction so over the years it's getting farther and farther away such that it won't eventually won't be able to have total solar eclipses it'll be it's called an annular Eclipse where it doesn't obscure it completely anyway so in the past this is the only way to say millions of years ago when the first hominids were evolved you know the moon was much much closer you know millions of times of their you know fingernails eventually it starts to add up um and certainly when the first life formed on the earth it was only you know uh was probably 30 times closer than it is now so yeah so I short answer I don't know where are some of the best places in the Northern Hemisphere and please don't say uh the North Pole um where people can go see spectacular um nighttime stuff yeah um so I think of yosity High Country in August for the meteor shower yeah certainly not at the level that you're accustomed to looking at things but with the naked eye you're going to be assuming that that it's not cloudy you're going to be treated to um a light show that is in my experience beyond anything I've ever exper just spe just extraordinary on my the special website that I made Brian king.com hubman I list the four major meteor showers in one in each season that people can watch with your naked eye in fact it's had to use a telescope you don't want a telescope because it juts through the field of view yeah exactly you want the whole field of view and humans have an amazing as you know huge field 190 degrees or something like that you know just so not as big as an owl but but quite big and you want to take that in because you're you're looking for motion you're looking for intensity sometimes you can see colors and I list what elements contribute to the colors of different meteorites on this you know website that I had um but yes the uh the anywhere that's uh more than say 20 30 40 miles away from a big major city is fine even in San Diego uh there's two dark sky communities one is called Julian California and the other one's the anab bgo desert and it's called bgo Springs these are areas where they uh forbid upward Shining Light so the only light can be downward facing it also has to have very narrow spectral bands on it so like sodium vapor you know very high so that you can filter it out basically with certain very inexpensive Optical filters but you know like I said almost anywhere but the good thing to know is that if you get a telescope again you can see 90% of what's going to be fascinating to you as as a lay person with a telescope that cost $50 you can see all the craters you can see mountains on the moon and again these mountains were not just like cool things they destroyed a they falsified the scientific Paradigm quote unquote which was that the moon was perfectly crystalline and and spherical Galileo showed no not only does it have mountains I can measure the height of those mountains I can measure the plains of L lava flows and and eventually they they came out theories that it doesn't have tectonic motion it doesn't have an iron core I mean it's amazing you can see all these things with your uh with the small telescope like the one I have for you um but uh you don't need like the Hubble telescope or Mount will you don't need any of that you can see the rings of Saturn the moons of Jupiter you can even on a dark sky without a telescope see an object that's outside of our galaxy it's called the Andromeda galaxy that's very important in the history of astronomy in 19 19 29 1923 rather uh on Mount Wilson not far from here Edwin Hubble realized that that was not part of the Milky Way galaxy it was way too far away to be located within the Milky Way it was about 20 times the radius of the Milky Way and that revolutionized all of our our you know con conceptions of where the universe is located is it centered on us are we the most important thing no he showed that you can see that on most fall nights in the constellation Andromeda with your naked eye it's six times wider than the full moon it's incredible when I look at many of the constellations I don't see how our ancient predecessors um got to the description of a a bear or whatever is that because they saw more stars than I did or is that because they had a Wilder imagination or we're taking psychedelics or something 20 centuries before Tik Tok um so I cut them some slack there are a couple that look similar to what they're you know or it depends on how you connect the dots the big The Big Dipper and the Little Dipper kind of like a okay you you get that those aren't constellations those aren't con I have to be I have to put on my my very very prec why are they not constellation uh so they're uh they're portions of a constellation so they're they're called asterisms so an asterism is a collection of stars that's associated with each other but it's not uh the the full composition of a constellation so the constellation is actually called Ursa Major the big Dippers in the tail and the hind quarters of Ursa Major which is the Great Bear the Little Dipper is the AST ISM Seven Stars that make up there's 80 something stars that make up the little bear which actually doesn't look like a bear Ursa Major kind of does look like the California republic flag that we have um but uh but yes the the asterism I always ask for people to leave you can't you know they're not making new constellations there's only 88 constellations over the whole uh four Pi spherical uh uh Dome of the sky but you can leave your own asterism on the podcast you can leave five stars on your podcast and mine so you can't have a constellation but you can have an Asis love it uh did you catch uh Haley's Comet when it came by when you were a few years older than I was I was uh I was uh 14 it was right after I got my first telescope comes through every SE every 70 some years make it to the next 76 years yeah that's right I'm right that was a that's very good yeah I remember 70 something all right but like the best constellation it's like the best comet in history in fact there's better ones yeah I remember going out to see it it was a part of a group that went camping and it looked like a smear of light it's hard to know did I really see it or did I not in any case um your daddy prob the only other comment that I that came to mind um oh is the San Diego thing was the hail Bop haop where there was a group that committed mass suicide yeah these were people that had castray themselves had been eating a subc caloric M sub maintenance caloric diet to live forever and then decide to wear Converse and kill themselves what do you think let's not go dark there um what what do you think is the relationship between like comets and these these wild human behaviors it's so interesting you mention that and lunacy for that matter like full moon and lunacy lunacy right crime statistics so look at these words disaster catastrophe they asked in both of those means star they used to believe that stars comets eclipses those things were influencing events on Earth caused by these Celestial forces for not propitiating them making them Gods happy or whatever and in fact Columbus owes his life you know he was almost killed in Jamaica and I think it was 15 uh 1498 a couple years after discovering he's still exploring and um he was failed to ingratiate himself with the local you know native inhabitants of Jamaica wherever he was um and uh they were going to kill him and he luckily had on for navigation astronomy and navigation have always been intimately related because um first of all if you know where Polaris is which is not the brightest star it's in the Little Dipper it's the pole star it's the North Star you've heard of True North Northstar it's actually very close to being if you go to the North Pole and look straight up it's very close to being directly above you and does it always Mark true north and and any human time scale it does over over thousands and tens of thousands of years it it changes but right now for the next couple thousand years so you know don't don't worry you still be accurate that is within a half a degree or that your brain thinks at these time scales as long as you're talking for the next thousand years you're good well I say like this you know the universe could end in a heat death and a big rip or whatever but you know that's not for a trillion years so everybody keep paying your taxes uh so you could use it for navigation so you could know your latitude but measuring longitude was very difficult because you couldn't actually you to know longitude you need to measure time relative to where grenwich meantime is that's how Greenwich became uh so important and that's why London had its huge economy again these things are always related capitalism and and even how we measure latitude and longitude comes from the fact that London and temps River 90% of the world's Commerce flowed through there at one point point or another it's incredible so anyway latitude longitude is very important people started to know that um yeah these these events would occur and including this event with with Columbus and his and he brought along with him on his voyage an astronomer um and this astronomer knew that in uh two days time from when these uh uh natives had captured some of Columbus's crew that there was going to be a total solar eclipse and it was going to go through Jamaica and he said he told Columbus and Columbus said to the inhabit if you don't give our people back our our God is going to obscure and kill your God the Sun God they're like f you you know whatever and then it happened and they totally believ that they were in control of these celestial events we better give the people back and Columbus got the hell out of there so it's an amazing story but yes comets have always been a a so Columbus actually um used the Sun as manipulative barter to to threat to as a threat military yeah he used it for military uh coercion an important book for anyone to read who's interested in basically why we're still here um in my opinion is the book longitude yes I'm interview Dava Soo I'm interviewing her tomorrow this is an incredible book um doesn't require any science or technical background to read and appreciate about the development of the first reliable timekeeping devices for navigating at Sea uh even on um overcast nights and uh longitud and finding longitude it's a spectacular read it is and um change the way that I think about human evolution and and Technology development generally direct connection I sorry to interrupt but there's a connection between that and the Nobel Prize so there was something called the longitude prize in the 1700s to develop a clock that could be used in the naval and Naval situations on boats you couldn't use a grandfather clock as the the pendulum acceleration so they had to find something and this guy Thompson or somebody Haron Harrison yes so he invented this this mechanical clock with predecessor of our modern WI up clocks obviously we used uh cesium and atomic clocks but that prize for 10,000 you know pounds or whatever it was was an early predecessor of the Nobel Prize I've been waiting this whole conversation to talk to you about Adaptive Optics let me give just a little bit of backdrop for how I'm approaching this um in the field of Neuroscience there there's as with any field of biology a desire to see smaller and smaller things at higher and higher resolution and there have been all sorts of incredible discoveries in microscopy like two Photon microscopy one Photon microscopy electron microscopy you see things down to the you know tiny tiny nanometer size some years ago uh a group out of University of Rochester developed um Adaptive Optics I think it was David Williams's Group which is borrowed from astronomy and my very top Contour understanding of this is that you're using the presence of noise in the environment essentially as part of the microscope to get a better image and this was used in the field of Opthalmology to look into the back of the eye this incredible three cell layer thick pie crust that lines the back of our eyes that it gives us all of our visual perception not alone but allows for all of our visual perception as I mentioned before that the eye has a lens there's Vitus there's all sorts of opportunity for light scatter and then within the the eye itself you've got these multiple layers you have to go through before you can see the photo receptors but using Adaptive Optics you can take all that noise all that stuff between the microscope and what you want to see Way Way Back in the eye and use that in air quotes here noise and make it part of the microscope so to speak and without going into further detail there I was always told that Adaptive Optics was borrowed from your field astronomy where people used the the presence of atmospheric dust of these stuff in the way and made it part of the lens if you will to be able to see things at higher resolution which I just think is so incredible it's like saying the the the barrier becomes the portal um through which you can see even more than had you had a clear obacle is the way let's sh out all right shout out Ryan holid never yeah never met him but I like that book very much okay so what what is Adaptive Optics yeah um at the level for astronomers okay so we live in an atmosphere a planet with an atmosphere thank God we wouldn't be here having this conversation right um and that atmosphere is a dirty window it's like literally looking through uh the windshield of your car and it's cloudy and Dusty and and contaminated we live in uh in in its presence and the best astronomical telescopes are the ones that are launched above the atmosphere out of the atmosphere Hubble Space Telescope Kepler and now the James web telescope again those are multi-billion dollar telescopes the James web to build it and by the way any one lesson to leave you with and maybe your audience with as well is whenever you hear a scientific instruments cost always in your mind at least double it Andrew Lang my late great mentor used to say multiply by pi uh because a you're not taking into account the fact that you don't build say a destroyer or an aircraft carrier to build it you build it to use it and it's about 10% of the operating of the uh construction cost to operate an instrument a battleship a telescope whatever it's a rule of thumb that project managers love to use so that means in 10 years it's going to double the price and we hope that Hubble and and web and Hubble's already lasted for years on it um so it'll last a long time so whenever you hear this but it's incredibly expensive one kilogram used to cost like $10,000 to bring to orbit and Elon keeps talking about how cheap it's going to be 5 but he has yet to launch a scientific instrument I talked to him for 10 minutes on my podcast once and I tried to get him to uh shut off these starlinks are amazing I have one in my house uh but they have the property that they go through astronomical images and they leave a satellite trail behind them which is you know can be com you're taking a picture of a deep star a deep you know Galaxy or whatever and you see these streaks going through it it ruins the image and you have to wait until they're gone but at least an optical astronomy you can physically literally paint those satellites black and they will no longer reflect and so they won't obscure the image whatsoever so you're saying that the Starling satellites are going to make your job more difficult they definitely uh are because you can while you can paint an optical satellite black and make it black we're looking for heat there's no way to stealth you know confuse or or BL out heat sorry that's a law of thermodynamics anything that's above absolute zero will always give off heat and worst of all the signals that he uses are in the exact microwave spectral range that we use to look at the CMB the cosmic microwave background so what's his response to this I told him that having internet everywhere is more important no he said he would look into it you know nine months ago Elon I know you like the show uh so please do reach out to me but this would be just turning it off when it's over our telescope basically that's what and the South Pole so it's not a big specific request there's no one at the it's not like he's getting millions of dollars in ad revenue from people at the South Pole they don't use them so anyway that's I'm I'm asking Elon it's it's a small ask but anyway um so we want to be above the atmosphere but it's Millions maybe billions of dollars to do that for a telescope like we're using or for an optical telescope here on Earth so scientists became very uh convinced that there has to be a way to mitigate the effects of the atmosphere now what is the main effect of the atmosphere well you learned it when you were a kid twinkle twink twinkle little star how I wonder what you are what is that twinkling it's called scintillation scintillation is a property of a point source which is a star so far away even though they're enormous they still only subtend a Zero Dimensional almost Zero Dimensional dot of light on the sky when it goes through the atmosphere the atmosphere has macroscopic turbulence features the atmosphere is a fluid there's turbulence there's roing columns or cells of the atmosphere and if you've ever looked at a star they Jitter they they they looks like they're moving around and that's the combination of the atmospheric cells each column of air that has slightly more density will refract light slightly different angles remember we talked about light when it goes through an a lens it refracts it bends so should we be thinking about the light from Stars kind of like a jagged line coming towards our eye it's coming through it's getting deflected slightly and it's moving in and it's landing on different retinal cells and we're perceiving that as is motion or in a CCD array it's also landing on different pixels so you can't get away from it you know by using uh technology it's still an effect it's caused by these atmospheric turbulent cells and by the way you can tell and you can identify a planet by the fact it does not scintillate it does not twinkle twinkle so Jupiter's visible tonight I hope you'll see it with the telescope we can see it after we're done recording uh we keep going we're about halfway done I figure uh we'll go outside we'll look at it and you'll see it's not it's stationary and I actually used that on the N of kiss my way for the first time but I'm not going to talk about that uh when you look at the planet you can identify them by their lack of C vation it's it's a way to identify if it's a a plane a star or a planet so astronomers including a colleague of mine and UC system CLA Max and other people realized in the 1960s and 70s that if they had um a a a fake star it's actually called either a guide star or an artificial star I'll explain what how they make that in a minute then if they knew the exact properties of that guide star then they could measure just the guide star through the same Optics of the telescope and then they would broad they would take the the light from that artificial star onto a flexible deformable mirror so the mirror could actually wobble and wiggle and it would do so an exactly compensatory way to nullify the atmospheric turbulence so it's basically what light does when it goes through um a cell of the atmosphere it traverses a slightly longer path difference so they would shorten the path difference of the mirror they make it a little bit closer in the direction of that cell and other places they make it farther away and vice versa they compensate for it and this was done by a combination of two technologies one was uh the deformable mirror that could Flex 100 times per second and the other was U making these artificial Stars so how do they make an artificial star they shoot a laser into the troposphere that laser illuminates sod the troposphere troposphere is a layer of the atmosphere uh I used to know all the different layers but okay okay osphere is the farthest away so some layer of the atmosphere it's 40 30 40 km above the Earth it's not quite in space farther enough away way that the laser beam is still columnated makes a nice beam and it can illuminate and then cause this sodium ions to uh flues basically so they start to get really stimulated it looks just like a star they know exactly how they produced it they know exactly what what phase and wavelength to correct in the mirror and then they say it's almost as good as going into space it corrects exactly the compensation of the Earth's atmosphere with the combination of this deformable mirror and it was actually used by my colleague Andrea gz here at UCLA uh to measure the properties of stars orbiting around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way and test Einstein's theory of relativity without this on the twin 10 meter diameter kek telescopes in Hawaii she never would have won that Nobel Prize so it's amazing technology but it was classified it was so uh useful to uh to astronomers uh but it wasn't as useful as to the military remember I said Galileo used his telescope to sell it to the military Venice uh it was immediately classified by the US military uh because if you think about a spy satellite what's it doing well it's staring down to earth and it's looking at license you know looking at whatever on Earth it's also going through the atmosphere it's going to have the same problems so they wanted to use that and have this technological advantage over the Soviets probably in the 1970s and 80s so they classified it they didn't let many uh astronomers could build things they could deliver the finished product but they couldn't patent it they couldn't use it and so Claire Max as I said she could have been you know super rich but it's interesting because now they're using it um so it's bad enough to look you know know from Earth to space but as I said if you imagine the Earth as having a slab of an atmosphere imagine a sniper the sniper trying to make a Kill Shot You Know Jack goes out there trying to hit something five kilometers three kilometers away or whatever there's a lot of atmosphere in the way and if you're looking through a optical site that will also happen so now they're they're actually using this Optical um compensation and sniper Scopes are using this technology Adaptive Optics so it's another way that astronomy has you know influenced military uh you know developments as well very interesting I don't want to go uh too far down this rabbit hole but I'm aware that there are some technologies now to use lasers to extract sound waves in a similar way so there are technologies that exist where you can shine a laser at say a window on a building from very far away and actually hear the conversation inside the room by way of the sound waves hitting that window the conversion of sound waves to Optical and then from Optical back to sound on your computer allows that also there was a technology that was um publicized a few years back developed in at least in part at Stanford the ability to see around corners um by shining lasers at the most visible location closest to what you want to see and then capturing Reflections and sound waves at that location and essentially being able to reconstruct images around corners see how many objects are there so pretty wild stuff you can you can imagine the military and spy implications but also just but but perhaps just as interesting um the ability to for instance map the uh positions and movements of Critters in the deep ocean without actually having to quote unquote see them you could you could hear hear them I had a really interesting experience a few Summers back of going to somebody's pool it was an impressive pool but the most impressive thing about it was that you could hear music perfectly well underwater using adaptive uh adaptive Acoustics and listening to your episode go no it's wild you could dive you listen to something above water dive below water and still hear it as if it playing in headphones maybe not quite as well as in headphones but and if you sosed around in the water there' be a little perturbation but it's pretty spectacular wasn't my pool unfortunately I have one um big question that I think everybody would like the answer to which is to what extent do you think there's life outside Earth um or not on Earth and when people hear this they think aliens but you know like an insect likee creature uh sing or small multicell organism on another planet that that itself would be a spectacular find yeah I mean Beyond spectacular um is there any evidence that that does exist is there any reason to think that it couldn't exist um and if it does would it have to be in a different in a different galaxy altogether what's the what what's the going uh belief among those who are like real scientists who don't believe that there's whatever just real scientists like what's what's the Thought like a centipede on Mars like I I don't think too many people would um be totally surprised um they but that'd be pretty wild well yeah I'm kind of an outlier so just everyone should you know look to the actual experts in this field but I have some rigorous you know kind of logical arguments that I believe the probability of Li I would never say it's zero but I think it's very low and I I think I can substantiate that and the best part is I can't be falsified right now there's zero evidence that there's life anywhere else in the universe period full stop and a sentence there's no evidence conclusive evidence in lots of drones over New Jersey right now not no evidence of Life knew get into drones um uh so the the argument that it would somehow first of all transform our understanding of human place is inarguable to me I I believe that's true although in um this movie contact is a really wonderful movie uh it's not cheesy science fiction it was the first to like use a wormhole and all sorts of cool stuff as contrivances but in that movie there's a scene where President Bill Clinton is talking about the discovery that this fictitious character made but he's actually talking about a meteorite that was discovered in Antarctica and they just clipped that and the meteorite was believed to have microbial life and that meteorite's origin was in inarguably from Mars okay so the reasoning was this 1997 that there was a meteorite found on in Antarctica where it's easy to find meteorites is in the movie in real life there in real life in 1997 a scientist announced a discovery of a meteorite from Antarctica it's called Allen Land Hills meteorite and it had what they claimed were evidence of microbial life and even respiration byproducts of these microbial life forms okay it was such a big deal that within minutes you know Bill Clinton had a press conference on the White House lawn where he goes this Rock speaks to us from across the generations and if confirmed will undoubtedly you know revolutionize our understanding of the universe around it okay now the movie clips that clip to make it seem like Ellie the fictitious character discovered a like you know set extraterrestrial technology not a microb but in the Public's in mind that actual scientific discovery was never falsified it was certainly never confirmed no one's ever come back to say that was correct and that we did find microbial evidence of microbial Life on Mars now how did that meteorite get there well uh some asteroids hit the moon that's why it has craters on it it hits the Earth that's why we have meteor crater Arizona winds Arizona uh yukatan chalub where the dinosaurs Doom was was sealed by the giant impactor 66 million years ago those impacts occur on every planet every moon in our solar system so some asteroid hit the surface of Mars probably millions of years ago ejected material low gravity on Mars low atmosphere uh and that material has been orbiting around and eventually made its way and hit the Earth okay so matter from Mars landed on the earth does that make sense that's how I gave you I have a lunar meteorite that I giving to you again as a as a as a token of my appreciation for all you do that came the same way something hit the moon blasted off some lunar it's called breia it's the crust of the Moon eventually made its way landed in northwest Africa and I bought a slice of it from a I got a dealer you know I got a meteorite dealer um and uh got that for you okay um so what's the lesson material gets exchanged from planet to planet now I asked the following question if that happened on the Mars to the Earth the moon to the earth so too has material from the earth been ejected since life emerged 3.7 billion years ago there's literally millions of tons of Earth that's floating around in space some of that will have landed on Mars so someday we'll get there we'll find some piece of it now could it some of it have a tardigrade on it could some of it have a protozoa on it obviously it could um and maybe some interesting mic microbes yeah it could maybe some ancient microbes that are no longer that's right um extent yeah it could it could have what's an adaptogen I I have no idea an adapt you talk about adaptogens adaptogens are it's it's a broad term used to describe um any compound that allows you to modulate the stress response so maybe increase your stress threshold or recover from stress more quickly it's it's sort of like saying stimulant no you know it's a broad category I mean I think you know some people say like you know certain nonhallucinogenic mushroom strains or adaptogens I mean the ability to to buffer the stress response um I mean things like riola have been described as adaptogens and these work through neurotransmitter systems so broadly speaking they allow you to um perceive effort as less effortful this kind of thing okay yeah so one theory of the formation of life on Earth you you asked me about that earlier the origin of life on Earth is a huge mystery how did life get here one proposition was made by Fred Hoy and other people sounds dirty but it's not it's called pans spermia just means that genetic material has been transferred from another um another astronomical object landed here on Earth so uh the converse reaction occurs as well but the the the fact is we don't observe it even on Mars so if I told you you know we've discovered a planet and there's another planet right next to it it has almost the same conditions it's in the so-called goldilock Zone where the temperatur is just right to have liquid water which Mars can have on it at certain times of the year and certain places on Mars it had flowing water on it we know for sure Mars had flowing water on it we know for sure that material from the earth got there when Earth had life on it so the absence of Life on Mars is a data point it's not pro probative or probative or just positive rather that life couldn't exist on Mars we haven't searched all of Mars but it at least shows there there's an impediment to it so people are lot fond of saying as I told you earlier there's about 10 to the 24th um planets probably in our observable universe going back to the Big Bang going out to the farthest reaches of the universe but even if you just take the Milky Way Galaxy there's probably you know literally 10 Bill hundreds of billions of planets in our galaxy alone and um when you look at that people like to say as Carl Sean did if there's no life it's an awful waste of space right why is there so much space and there's no life that seems incomprehensible but nature you know I love when atheist scientists will say like you propose God exist and that's the god of the gaps to explain things that you don't understand but when science advances we'll have an explanation for why you know Thunder occurs it's not because of Thor right we get rid of gods as we learn more and so the god gaps shrink smaller and smaller but they'll say the same argument about life in the they'll say well there's God to be life because there's so much room there but as I told you I've been in Antarctica twice the only life forms I saw there okay were people um I saw a few penguins in the distance and a couple of dead sea lions there's no trees there's no Flora at all on the entire continent it's incredibly Barren and yet Andrew it makes up 8% of the of the land mass of the Earth wow and you would think well it's just proportional to the amount of area I.E the number of stars there should be 8% of the life on Earth there should be a billion people there whatever you know 600 million PE no there's nothing there except for scientists that go there so the the odds of life you know are you can't construct probability from possibility that and many many other arguments that I could give you the the the improbability of Life how hard it is to create life and you know if you just sprinkled imagine you had a koala Cannon okay people like Peta are going to get you just go to Mars and spray it with koala it's obviously not going to like would probably be okay with you populating with the an area with koalas a Canon to take out koalas they would probably that's right they would not like that so yeah so probab uh you know possibility is not probability uh the number number of hurdles to create a a single cell is enormous uh we have yet to reproduce you know to make a functional cell in the laboratory not that that's a requirement to prove that life could Exist Elsewhere just saying it's very hard our history of life we have an N of one it's very difficult to speculate on and if we're alone if if life is abundant as fery asked many many many years ago um if life is abundant and the Galaxy is is old where are they where are the aliens there should have been plenty of time not only for them to evolve and and be superior to us in many ways and travel the distances of the of our our galaxy not even of the cosmos of our galaxy where are they where are they they've known about us for 80 years because we've been broadcasting radio waves for the last 85 years do you know this theory about the gut microbiota you know our our guts our skin our eyes our nose but certainly our D entire digestive tract um the whole way down from our lips um out the other end our populated with these little microbiota that influence everything from fatty acid production neurotransmitter production Etc influence more than human cells right yeah oh yeah and it's powerful for modulating all sorts of biological processes and um and every time we interact shake hands if people kiss if you interact with dirt if you interact with a pet you the the microbiome changes it's a it's an inner uh reflection of of all your outer behaviors and internet yeah yeah and then we're learning a lot about it that there's this one theory that I like that um kind of turns life as as you and I know it on its head which is that um humans and other species are just vehicles for the microbiome and that you know and so you would take something like the desire to uh like like uh populate Mars or to shoot or to land on the moon as just the microbiota you know taking advantage of this weird old world primate species that we call Homo sapiens that loves to develop technology almost destroy itself but then continue to to uh evolve social media Etc warn each other about declining birth rates and then just to to basically the microbiota have a what you know a sort of quote unquote Consciousness not a brain but consciousness of their own which is like all species to make more of itself go further and further out and populate it's hard to punch holes in the logic of this of this model but it it certainly diminishes our our conscious experience um we could go on forever about uh this Trail I I'll just kind of put a kind of a cliffhanger out there it'd be wonderful sometime to sit down with you and discuss the possibility of rather than thinking about life elsewhere in the Galaxy given what we know about physics and Engineering astronomy Etc would it be be possible to build a planet at the appropriate distance from the Sun that we could spawn Life by bringing things there as opposed to trying to take it you know figure out how to how to do it at a at a distance that it might not be amendable to life right you know maybe creating a garden Planet maybe we don't put humans there right away um but trying to create a garden that could Thrive at the some appropriate distance from the Sun um and seeing what what what nutrients could be grown there you know so you could have robots man this this planet but you'd have to somehow aggre um stuff in space to build this planet or launch this planet up that it would collect things I mean that to me feels like a fun experiment and a lot less risky than going up up to other planets um yeah I was I was blessed as my first guest on the anth The Impossible podcast that Freeman Dyson now you mentioned with your dad your dad mentioned him uh one of the greatest intellects of the of the last hundred years great physicist and he had these ideas for these Dyson spheres which would be you know uh energy harvesting so the first you know ingredient that you need to construct the the Hu you Planet uh uh habitable zone is to have uh is have energy it Harvest as much energy as possible from a star so he he basically conjectured a a mega structure an alien mega structure that could be observable by astronomers could detect these these objects and and some have claimed that we have but those have always been refuted and it would be basically surrounding a star capturing every Photon worth of energy that came out of it and then converting that to mechanical energy and then yes and then once you have Infinite Energy you can actually do Fusion you could make up whatever molecules you want you could make up you know print 3D printing at the at the Quark level on up basically and so that was his you know conjecture of how super Advanced aliens would behave but again we have no evidence for it but it's fun it's certainly fun to have the science fiction you know kind of you know a lot of interesting science you know originates from ideas and creativity that originates from science fiction so that would be a lot of fun you and I could talk about the Stars the planets Optics animals here on Earth um infinitely um this is what happens folks when two real uh real nerds get together and want to learn from one another and I hope U you delighted in this at least um half as much as I did uh those of you listening um I mean you occupy an incredible place and I mean that you know like your your intellectual place since you were a child is is a remarkable place um that most people I think don't occupy not because they don't have the training but because they just haven't put their mind on there on these questions and I think one thing that's so clear is that through your podcast your books and certainly through the discussion today um you've placed Us in the in the position of scientist um to be able to let Ponder these these really big questions about really big really distant things is is not typically the way that my brain uh functions I think most people are uh more focused on things proximal to them and and here on here on Earth but I'm so grateful that you that you did and um and I'm so grateful that you continue to educate we didn't even get to talk about but I'll just mention that you've been a absolutely spectacular proponent for um Popular Science Education and the importance of that I've been very inspired by you and your work thank you uh very inspired by your story um sure because of some similarities and you know Fathers and Sons and the tribulations Etc different but some some overlap there but also just because of the way that you approach life um and it's very clear to me that as a person who's focused on things very very far away where apparently there there's no observable life yet not yet um that you're also very grounded in in this thing that we call daily life and the Delight of of of exploration and asking questions and uh if ever there was a a call to arms for people to get outside and look at the stars perhaps through a telescope or perhaps through the telescopes on the front of their their skull um certainly to do that and to think about some of what was discussed today because I I'm certainly Enchanted and I I know those listening and watching are as well so thank you for everything you do keep doing it come back let's keep talking we didn't talk about God in the universe and um the origins of life but we'll do that before long and uh Brian keing thanks for being you I appreciate you thanks Andrew you've been a big inspiration to me too and you know use your language thank you for your interest in science it's really done uh so much for the world and you give it all for free and it's uh it's truly an inspiration and it's really fun to talk to somebody who's you know at the level that you're at and so many different things and still has that you know as scientist we get inured we get kind of used to things oh there's a rainbow there's a meteor you know whatever but you still have that passion you have that passion that Curiosity and I think that's what makes a true scientist and the the function of Education seems to beat that out of kids but um but really to have that in the domain and the expertise that you have is is a real inspiration and I think it's a huge service to society so I want to thank you too thank you well it's a labor of love mixed within Affliction so we'll keep going right back at you thanks Brian thanks Andrew thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Brian keading I hope you found it to be as informative and indeed fascinating as I did to learn more about Dr King's work his podcast his book and other resources please see the show note captions if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us please also click follow for the podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five-star review please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast if you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or topics or guests that you'd like me to consider for the huberman Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube I do read all the comments and if you're not already following me on social media I am hubman lab on all social media platforms so that's Instagram X formerly known as Twitter Facebook threads and Linkedin and on all those platforms I discuss science and science related tools some of which overlaps with the content of the hubman Lab podcast but much of which is distinct from the content on the hubman Lab podcast again that's huberman lab on all social media platforms for those of you that haven't heard I have a new book coming out it's my very first book it's entitled protocols an operating manual for the human body this is a book that I've been working on for more than 5 years and that's based on 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huberman lab.com go to the menu tab and in the top right corner scroll down to newsletter and enter your email and I should mention that we do not share your email with anybody thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Brian keading and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science [Music]