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How are scientific discoveries made? · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Hollywood tells us what it's like to make a scientific discovery. Okay,
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: set the scene. A lone scientist wearing a lab coat
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: because they're always wearing a lab coat for some reason,
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: has a flash of inspiration, sometimes during a musical montage,
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: and that's when the ideas come together. He and it's
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: almost always a he rushes out to tell the world
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: and everyone greets the news with enthusiasm. That's a fun
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: bit of storytelling. But what is it really like? Does
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: that scenario ever happen? Or are scientists working slowly for
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: decades pushing the fuzzy bits of the puzzle together until
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: people are finally convinced. And yes, I have to admit
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: that wouldn't make quite as good of a movie. But anyway,
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: today we're going to pull back the curtain on the
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: process of scientific discovery and tell you stories of dramatic
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: as well as frustratingly slow discoveries. You'll hear the actual
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: historical audio of scientists being shocked at a discovery that
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: they were making in real time, a conversation with a
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: historian of science, and an interview with a man who
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: has spoken to more Nobel prize winners than maybe anyone
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: else on the planet, and we'll try to learn what
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: led to moments of understanding and discovery. Welcome to Daniel
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. Hello. I'm Kelly winder Smith. I
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: study parasites and space, and today we're going to talk
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: about how many times I have not discovered things.
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: Hello.
• 1:45
  Speaker 3: I'm Daniel Whitson. I'm a particle physicist, and I got
• 1:48
  Speaker 3: into particle physics to reveal the fundamental nature of the
• 1:52
  Speaker 3: universe and make earth shattering discoveries. But in thirty years
• 1:56
  Speaker 3: I've made exactly zero.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: You've made exactly zero. Okay, Well that's a nice lead
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: into the question I have for you today. So you know,
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: at least in my field, and I assume this is
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: the same in your field. Before you start an experiment,
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: you have a prediction, you have an expectation for how
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: the results are going to go, and then you design
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: your experiment well so that if you're wrong, you can
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: be sure that you're wrong. That's a good experiment. So
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: what percent of the time roughly does the work that
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: you do match the predictions that you made initially?
• 2:25
  Speaker 3: Wow, way to put your finger on a source bot, Kelly,
• 2:28
  Speaker 3: So far every single experiment. We've done matches our expectations,
• 2:33
  Speaker 3: and we've even analyzed the statistics of that, Like you
• 2:37
  Speaker 3: don't expect when you flip a coin to get exactly
• 2:39
  Speaker 3: fifty percent heads and tails on a fair coin. You
• 2:42
  Speaker 3: expect some fluctuations, and we see exactly those kinds of fluctuations.
• 2:46
  Speaker 3: Sometimes the data is a little bit weird, rarely it's
• 2:49
  Speaker 3: very weird, and almost never is it super duper weird.
• 2:53
  Speaker 3: So we have a beautiful Gaussian curve of all of
• 2:56
  Speaker 3: our weirdness and really no surprises so far.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: So every paper you've done, the prediction you were testing,
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: you found exactly what you expected.
• 3:05
  Speaker 3: I mean, I work in a field where if we
• 3:07
  Speaker 3: find something unexpected, it's a Nobel prize. Right. If you
• 3:11
  Speaker 3: find a new particle, if you find a new force,
• 3:14
  Speaker 3: that's a huge revelation. So we are constantly searching for stuff.
• 3:18
  Speaker 3: No we didn't find dark matter, No we didn't find this,
• 3:21
  Speaker 3: No we didn't find that. Ninety nine point ninety nine
• 3:23
  Speaker 3: percent of our papers are negative results. We looked for
• 3:27
  Speaker 3: X and we didn't see it. The standard model wins again.
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: Well, congratulations for being right on thousands of papers, Like
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: you told us the other day you have thousands of publications.
• 3:39
  Speaker 3: No, no, it's a great disappointment. I wish that we
• 3:42
  Speaker 3: were wrong. I got into this field to prove the
• 3:44
  Speaker 3: standard model wrong, to find situations where we see something
• 3:47
  Speaker 3: we don't expect, and not just to discover something new. Right,
• 3:51
  Speaker 3: some theorists could come up with a model of supersymmetry
• 3:53
  Speaker 3: and predict the selectron or whatever, and we could go
• 3:55
  Speaker 3: off and see that. That's sort of what happened with
• 3:58
  Speaker 3: the Higgs boson and with the top quark twenty years earlier.
• 4:01
  Speaker 3: But it's been a long time since we had a surprise,
• 4:03
  Speaker 3: a moment when the data told us something about the
• 4:06
  Speaker 3: universe we weren't expecting.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: Well, Daniel, I'm excited that I can say to you
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: that I wish you failure.
• 4:12
  Speaker 3: There you go exactly. What about you? How about your
• 4:15
  Speaker 3: great moments of discovery where they unexpected or expected.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: I think I'm at like fifty to fifty on my
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: predictions panning out, like I mean, so it's it's not
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: a like coin flip. I actually, you know, I do
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: serious literature searches, but you know, when you study animal behaviors,
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: so often it's like, oh, you know, we know that
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: the neurotransmitters are doing this, so we should predict that
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: the animal will do this, and then they don't do
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: what you expected. And that's pretty typical as we sort
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: of muddle through neuroscience and whatnot.
• 4:45
  Speaker 3: Well, when that happens, when they don't do what you expect,
• 4:48
  Speaker 3: have you learned something about the animal, something fundamental that
• 4:51
  Speaker 3: is scientific, or have you learned oops, I made a mistake,
• 4:54
  Speaker 3: or I don't know how to do neuroscience or something.
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: No, we always learn something like I do. I spend
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: a lot of time. I'm carefully designing my experiments so
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: that even if the answer is things didn't go the
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: way you thought they would, there's still something interesting to.
• 5:08
  Speaker 3: Say, Well, that's a well designed experiment. Congratulations, Oh thanks,
• 5:12
  Speaker 3: we published No matter what.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: That's right. Well, I've gotten very comfortable with this form
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: of failure, and.
• 5:19
  Speaker 3: The success and failure of scientists is part of our
• 5:22
  Speaker 3: topic today. We are doing a deep dive into the
• 5:25
  Speaker 3: nature of the scientific process, pulling back the curtain on
• 5:28
  Speaker 3: how science actually works. What scientists do all day. We
• 5:31
  Speaker 3: don't just take naps and wake up with great moments
• 5:34
  Speaker 3: of inspiration, though I guess that does happen for some
• 5:37
  Speaker 3: of us. We work slowly and carefully through the process
• 5:41
  Speaker 3: of science, figuring out how the universe works and convincing
• 5:44
  Speaker 3: our peers of what we have learned. We have an
• 5:46
  Speaker 3: episode later this week on the scientific review process, but
• 5:50
  Speaker 3: today we're digging into the juiciest bit how scientific discoveries
• 5:54
  Speaker 3: actually happen.
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: And we are super lucky to have a bunch of
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: different input for this particular episode. We're going to start
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: with Daniel walking us through what discovery tends to look
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: like in physics. Then we're going to bring an expert
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: on to talk to us about the history of scientific discoveries,
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: and finally we're talking to someone who interviewed a bunch
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: of Nobel Prize winners and asked them about their discoveries
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: and how that went along. So Daniel on this path
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: of discovery. Maybe this should be a self help podcast
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: now it feels self healthy right now.
• 6:27
  Speaker 3: But how to win a Nobel Prize Steps one through ten.
• 6:29
  Speaker 3: You'll be shocked at step seven.
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: Well, let's start with your first discovery that you want
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: to tell us about today.
• 6:35
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it's important to walk through some examples
• 6:37
  Speaker 3: of discoveries because I think that the picture people have
• 6:41
  Speaker 3: in their minds of how scientific discovery happens is shaped
• 6:45
  Speaker 3: by a lot of these stories, most of which are
• 6:47
  Speaker 3: apocryphal and give people sort of a cartoonish view of
• 6:50
  Speaker 3: the process. And I want to get into the nitty gritty.
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: So I have to make a confession here, which is
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: that for a long time I didn't realize that apocryphal
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: means a story that isn't true. Oh no, So I'd
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: just like to clear that up for anyone who is
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: comparably bad at the English language.
• 7:09
  Speaker 3: These are great dinner party stories or popsy clickbait, but
• 7:12
  Speaker 3: they're not always real. And maybe one of the most
• 7:16
  Speaker 3: famous moments of discovery is Newton and the Apple. As
• 7:20
  Speaker 3: the story goes, Newton is sitting in his garden. He
• 7:23
  Speaker 3: sees an apple fall down, and he thinks about it
• 7:25
  Speaker 3: deep and he goes, hmmm, why do apples fall down
• 7:28
  Speaker 3: towards the center of the earth? And he comes up
• 7:30
  Speaker 3: with this theory of gravity. Is that the story you've heard, Kelly?
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: Absolutely?
• 7:35
  Speaker 3: And does that story make sense to you? Like, how
• 7:38
  Speaker 3: does looking at an apple tell anybody how gravity works?
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: I mean, I guess I didn't imagine that he looked
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: at the apple and immediately knew how gravity works. I
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: imagined that he saw the apple fall and thought to himself,
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: why did it go down and not up? And that
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: got him sort of thinking about the question more deeply.
• 7:56
  Speaker 3: Well, you know, that's a question that Aristotle worked on
• 7:59
  Speaker 3: thousands of years earlier, like why do things fall down?
• 8:02
  Speaker 3: It was a deep question, and you know, his answer
• 8:05
  Speaker 3: was like, well, there's some things it's in their nature
• 8:07
  Speaker 3: to fall down, and an apple and rocks and earth
• 8:10
  Speaker 3: are made of the falling down kind of stuff. And
• 8:13
  Speaker 3: that's not really an answer, you know, but this definitely
• 8:16
  Speaker 3: has been a question for a long long time. And
• 8:18
  Speaker 3: so it doesn't even really make sense to me, because
• 8:21
  Speaker 3: like seeing the apple inspires the question, but the question
• 8:24
  Speaker 3: is an ancient and outstanding one. Anyway, this whole story
• 8:27
  Speaker 3: doesn't make any sense because it's all made up. It
• 8:30
  Speaker 3: didn't really happen that way at all. The real story
• 8:33
  Speaker 3: is that Newton took years, decades to develop his theory
• 8:37
  Speaker 3: of gravity. He was writing letters back and forth with
• 8:40
  Speaker 3: another scientist, Hook for years, and he was thinking about gravity,
• 8:43
  Speaker 3: and he was wondering if you could come up with
• 8:45
  Speaker 3: a theory of gravity to explain why apples fall down,
• 8:49
  Speaker 3: and also why the moon doesn't fall down? Right, like
• 8:53
  Speaker 3: why is the moon in orbit around the Earth? This
• 8:55
  Speaker 3: kind of stuff, And so he was trying to develop that,
• 8:57
  Speaker 3: and he was trying to make it mathematical. He didn't
• 9:00
  Speaker 3: want just a story like Aristotle provided. He wanted a theory,
• 9:04
  Speaker 3: something that would let you calculate the force between two objects,
• 9:07
  Speaker 3: for example. And so it took him two decades to
• 9:10
  Speaker 3: put this theory together. And the you know, the fundamental
• 9:13
  Speaker 3: idea he came up with is that gravity gets weaker
• 9:16
  Speaker 3: with distance. And he showed that if you framed it
• 9:18
  Speaker 3: in this one over are squared or are as the
• 9:21
  Speaker 3: distance between objects, the force drops with a distance squared,
• 9:26
  Speaker 3: that you could actually calculate not just that an apple
• 9:28
  Speaker 3: should fall, but also that the moon should be in
• 9:31
  Speaker 3: its orbit. And he was able to reproduce the motion
• 9:34
  Speaker 3: of the moon. And this is the great triumph to
• 9:36
  Speaker 3: have a single theory of gravity that describes not just
• 9:39
  Speaker 3: what's happening on Earth, but also in the heavens.
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: All right, Well, so first I'm wondering with the Aristotle
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: and the birds. Did he think that the that birds
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: were like made of uppy stuff sometimes and downy stuff others,
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: and like what did this transmogrification look like? But let's
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: not get too far off topic.
• 9:55
  Speaker 3: I would love to have Aristotle on the podcast him
• 9:57
  Speaker 3: some of these questions, you know, also questions like why
• 10:00
  Speaker 3: didn't you ever do an experiment to try out some
• 10:02
  Speaker 3: of your ideas? Like in ten minutes, Galileo disproved a
• 10:07
  Speaker 3: lot of Aristontal's ideas just by doing experiments.
• 10:10
  Speaker 4: Well.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: I was looking at the New York Times Bestseller's paperback
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: list the other day, and a book that beat mine
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: is one where a medium is giving you advice from
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: the dead. So maybe we can there's some people we
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: can reach out to you to make that happen.
• 10:23
  Speaker 3: But that's nonfiction.
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: That's in the nonfiction. Yeah, I know, so anyway, but
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: and it beat me fai But anyway.
• 10:30
  Speaker 3: So, but you guys are on the nonfiction bestseller list.
• 10:33
  Speaker 4: How we are.
• 10:34
  Speaker 3: Congrats?
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: Thanks, it'll be it. It won't be top secret by
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: the time the episode comes out, but we're on eleven.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: And Ada will point out that we didn't break the
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: top ten, which is what she does every time I
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: mentioned that we're on the New York Times bestsellers list.
• 10:47
  Speaker 3: Oh my god, that's huge. Wow, wonderful.
• 10:50
  Speaker 5: Thanks.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: Anyway, would be nice if I was above the medium person,
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: but I'm not.
• 10:53
  Speaker 3: But anyway, okay, So well, that gives you a very
• 10:56
  Speaker 3: nice cocktail story to tell when next time you go
• 10:58
  Speaker 3: to a fancy party. And this is what happened with Newton. Oh,
• 11:01
  Speaker 3: Newton developed his theory of gravity, and then he told
• 11:04
  Speaker 3: this story at like parties where it's like I saw
• 11:07
  Speaker 3: the apple and I had a moment of inspiration. And
• 11:10
  Speaker 3: so this is Newton basically writing clickbait. And then the
• 11:13
  Speaker 3: story got around and Voltaire heard about it. He's a
• 11:17
  Speaker 3: famous writer, and he wrote about it, and that's what
• 11:20
  Speaker 3: popularized it. And so Newton sort of like wrote a
• 11:23
  Speaker 3: pr pitch about his moment of inspiration that didn't really happen,
• 11:27
  Speaker 3: and then it got propagated by the mainstream media, which
• 11:29
  Speaker 3: was Voltaire at the time.
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: Amazing, How do we know that this didn't really happen
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: to Newton if he said it did?
• 11:35
  Speaker 3: Well, we have records of Newton's work, right, Like the
• 11:38
  Speaker 3: dude kept logbooks and we have his letters, and we
• 11:40
  Speaker 3: see him struggling with these concepts together with Hook over years.
• 11:44
  Speaker 3: And then it was twenty years later that his theory
• 11:46
  Speaker 3: was fully developed. So we see the development of it
• 11:49
  Speaker 3: in his notes and in his letters.
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: Huh, all right, fantastic. I didn't expect Voltaire to come
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: into our episode today, but there he is.
• 11:56
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, that's because this is the best of all
• 11:58
  Speaker 3: possible podcasts.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: Oh my god, us you're so right, you're so right.
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: All right. So while people are discovering that this is
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: the best podcast ever, let's move on to another amazing
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: bombshell of a discovery about radioactivity.
• 12:10
  Speaker 3: So here's a moment of discovery that really is sort
• 12:13
  Speaker 3: of like the cartoon. There's an accident which leads to
• 12:16
  Speaker 3: a moment of inspiration and then like very rapidly, publication
• 12:20
  Speaker 3: and awards.
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: Just real quick to say, you usually don't want the
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: words accident and radioactivity in the same sentence. So I'm
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: hoping this accidental discovery didn't end anyone's life.
• 12:30
  Speaker 3: Pretty sure everybody involved in early radiation discovery's got cancer.
• 12:34
  Speaker 3: Oh sometimes several times.
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: All right, you're the downer today.
• 12:37
  Speaker 3: All right, speaking of X rays and cancer, some listener
• 12:43
  Speaker 3: wrote in recently and told me that until fairly recently,
• 12:47
  Speaker 3: you could go to a shoe store and get a
• 12:49
  Speaker 3: very intense X ray of your foot to make sure
• 12:52
  Speaker 3: your shoe is sized correctly.
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: Huh yeah, do not recommend.
• 12:56
  Speaker 3: Do not recommend, absolutely not. Anyway, Becherel is credited with
• 13:00
  Speaker 3: the discovery of radioactivity, specifically in uranium, and this comes
• 13:05
  Speaker 3: quick on the heels of Runken's discovery of X rays,
• 13:08
  Speaker 3: which was also an accident. We can dig into that
• 13:11
  Speaker 3: another time. But X rays with a new thing. Everybody
• 13:13
  Speaker 3: was excited about X rays and becherrel knew that uranium,
• 13:17
  Speaker 3: if you left it near photographic plates, would leave an
• 13:20
  Speaker 3: imprint on the plate. So, for example, uranium crystal and
• 13:23
  Speaker 3: you put it on top of the plate, that it
• 13:25
  Speaker 3: would leave the shape of the crystal onto the plate.
• 13:28
  Speaker 3: And he was wondering how this worked, and he actually
• 13:30
  Speaker 3: had the totally wrong theory. He thought that uranium was
• 13:33
  Speaker 3: absorbing sunlight and emitting X rays because X rays with
• 13:37
  Speaker 3: this new exciting thing, and so he thought, maybe that's
• 13:40
  Speaker 3: what's happening, and so he wanted to do this experiment
• 13:42
  Speaker 3: where he wrapped photographic plates in paper so that visible
• 13:46
  Speaker 3: light didn't hit them, and then he would put a
• 13:48
  Speaker 3: block of uranium on top of that, and they put
• 13:50
  Speaker 3: the whole thing out in the sunlight. And the idea
• 13:53
  Speaker 3: was the uranium would absorb sunlight amid X rays which
• 13:56
  Speaker 3: would go through the paper and leave an imprint on
• 13:58
  Speaker 3: the plate. That was his big experiment. Okay, but it
• 14:01
  Speaker 3: was cloudy in Paris, right, Paris did not cooperate with
• 14:04
  Speaker 3: his plans. His experiment needed sunlight, so he put the
• 14:07
  Speaker 3: whole thing in a drawer over the weekend, and he
• 14:10
  Speaker 3: came back after the weekend and he decided to develop
• 14:13
  Speaker 3: the photographic plate, even though he hadn't put it out
• 14:15
  Speaker 3: in the sunlight. And what he saw was a perfect
• 14:17
  Speaker 3: picture of the uranium crystal, even though there hadn't been
• 14:20
  Speaker 3: any sunlight. And that's when he realized, Oh, the uranium
• 14:23
  Speaker 3: is actually just generating radiation on its own. It doesn't
• 14:26
  Speaker 3: require sunlight, and it wasn't X rays, and so this
• 14:30
  Speaker 3: is like his moment of discovery. He realized, Wow, this
• 14:33
  Speaker 3: uranium is generating something on its own. He reported it
• 14:37
  Speaker 3: the very next day to like the Academic Society and
• 14:40
  Speaker 3: then won the Nobel Prize for it.
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: WHOA, I wonder why he decided to develop the photographic
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: plate anyway, Yeah.
• 14:46
  Speaker 3: People asked him this and he was just like, I
• 14:48
  Speaker 3: don't know on a hunch. I just was wondering, you know,
• 14:51
  Speaker 3: just like curiosity.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah, that is amazingly lucky.
• 14:55
  Speaker 3: It's very lucky. Yeah, absolutely, And he's also very lucky
• 14:57
  Speaker 3: because it turns out that somebody else did the same
• 15:00
  Speaker 3: thing forty years earlier and wrote it up and reported
• 15:03
  Speaker 3: it and was just totally ignored.
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: Oh no, And did Becquerel cite this other guy.
• 15:09
  Speaker 3: No, it was just like lost in the literature. You know,
• 15:12
  Speaker 3: how you've done something and then you think it's clever,
• 15:14
  Speaker 3: and then you discovered that some Soviet dude did it
• 15:16
  Speaker 3: in nineteen seventy eight much better than you did.
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: Happens to me all the time.
• 15:20
  Speaker 3: That's because we have good literature searches and they didn't
• 15:23
  Speaker 3: at that time. And so yeah, but this was really
• 15:25
  Speaker 3: a moment write an accident. Very quickly becherel realized what
• 15:30
  Speaker 3: it meant, and it changed our understanding of the whole
• 15:33
  Speaker 3: microscopic world. And this led to Curi's experiments and the
• 15:36
  Speaker 3: foundation of quantum mechanics.
• 15:38
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: So I always thought that Kuri discovered radioactivity. Can you
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: quickly tell us what it was that she discovered in particular?
• 15:43
  Speaker 3: Right? So, Curi discovered two new radioactive elements. Right, Becquerel
• 15:47
  Speaker 3: discovered radioactivity from uranium salts. Curi discovered polonium and radium.
• 15:52
  Speaker 3: She actually coined the term radioactivity. And Curi's real insight
• 15:57
  Speaker 3: is that radioactivity is an atomic property, not chemical one.
• 16:00
  Speaker 3: It's not like you got atoms bumping together and emitting
• 16:04
  Speaker 3: something due to some reaction. It's something inside the atom
• 16:07
  Speaker 3: that's happening.
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: Okay, awesome. So next I see that we're talking about
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: the m M experiment, which makes me think about eminem's
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: and now I'm hungry. Is this experiment delicious?
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: Yes, this is the experiment to discover whether different colors
• 16:20
  Speaker 3: of eminems actually have different flavors and.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: Why they melt in your mouth but not in your hand,
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: which side note absolutely.
• 16:28
  Speaker 3: No, No, this is the Michael Sinmoreley experiment, the famous
• 16:32
  Speaker 3: experiment that taught us that light travels the same speed
• 16:36
  Speaker 3: for all observers and disproved the existence of the ether.
• 16:39
  Speaker 4: Oh.
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: That's important.
• 16:40
  Speaker 3: It's important, and it's often told as this groundbreaking experiment
• 16:45
  Speaker 3: which pivoted our understanding of the universe. And it's true
• 16:48
  Speaker 3: that this was an unexpected result and it proves something
• 16:51
  Speaker 3: really important about the universe. But contrary to the popular lore,
• 16:55
  Speaker 3: it's not something that was widely understood or appreciated at
• 16:58
  Speaker 3: the time. It's a little bit revisionist history to go
• 17:02
  Speaker 3: back and say, oh, yeah, this experiment happened, and then
• 17:04
  Speaker 3: everybody changed their mind.
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: Oh so this experiment happened. Nobody changed their mind because
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: they ignored it, just like the last guy who discovered radioactivity,
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: whose name I think we managed to not even say.
• 17:14
  Speaker 6: So.
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: Take that guy who did it first.
• 17:17
  Speaker 3: That was Abel, the Saint Victor, who discovered radioactivity forty
• 17:21
  Speaker 3: years before Becquerel, but was ignored by the Nobel Committee.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: But we've just said it straight.
• 17:26
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and that's not exactly what happened here. People were
• 17:29
  Speaker 3: aware of this experiment. They just really struggled to digest
• 17:33
  Speaker 3: this bizarre concept that like could travel without a medium.
• 17:37
  Speaker 3: And so let's go back to eighteen eighty seven when
• 17:39
  Speaker 3: this experiment happened. Back then, we had interference experiments and
• 17:43
  Speaker 3: diffraction studies. We had all this data showing that light
• 17:46
  Speaker 3: was a wave, and Maxwell had his equations that described
• 17:50
  Speaker 3: light as ripples in electromagnetism. But they were wondering, like,
• 17:54
  Speaker 3: what is it a ripple in you know like sound
• 17:57
  Speaker 3: is a ripple in air, and water waves are obviously
• 17:59
  Speaker 3: ripples in water. But what is light propagating through you?
• 18:03
  Speaker 3: This velocity that we see should be relative to some
• 18:07
  Speaker 3: medium if light is the same kind of thing as
• 18:09
  Speaker 3: everything else we've studied. And so Michael Sen Morley did
• 18:13
  Speaker 3: this experiment to try to detect that medium. They said, well,
• 18:16
  Speaker 3: if light is moving through some medium, let's call it
• 18:18
  Speaker 3: the ether, and it fills the universe, the Earth is
• 18:21
  Speaker 3: also moving through it because the Earth goes around the Sun.
• 18:24
  Speaker 3: And so as the Earth goes around the Sun, we
• 18:26
  Speaker 3: should see different velocities of the speed of light because
• 18:28
  Speaker 3: we have a different velocity relative to the ether. And
• 18:32
  Speaker 3: so they did this cool experiment with interferometers where they
• 18:35
  Speaker 3: had a light beam and they split it and it
• 18:37
  Speaker 3: went into perpendicular directions and then came back. And they
• 18:40
  Speaker 3: were very sensitive to small differences because of their cool
• 18:43
  Speaker 3: optics and interferometry, and they expected when they did the
• 18:47
  Speaker 3: experiment in spring and in summer and in fall and
• 18:49
  Speaker 3: in winter, they would get different results and they could
• 18:51
  Speaker 3: measure our velocity through the ether. But what they found
• 18:55
  Speaker 3: was no difference. That there was never any difference in
• 18:58
  Speaker 3: how long it took light to go go one direction
• 19:01
  Speaker 3: or the other, and this was totally insensitive to the
• 19:04
  Speaker 3: time of year, and they it was really an amazing experiment,
• 19:07
  Speaker 3: like the detail they put in it to make this
• 19:09
  Speaker 3: thing super sensitive, and so they found nothing, and that
• 19:12
  Speaker 3: was very confusing. Like obviously now in hindsight, the conclusion
• 19:16
  Speaker 3: is there is no ether, and light moves to the
• 19:18
  Speaker 3: same velocity regardless of the observer, and it's a propagation
• 19:21
  Speaker 3: of electromagnetic waves through space itself. We know that now,
• 19:25
  Speaker 3: but it's not fair to say, like we thought there
• 19:27
  Speaker 3: was an ether. We had Michael Simmore the experiment. The
• 19:29
  Speaker 3: next day it was like, yeah, let's move on. Obviously
• 19:32
  Speaker 3: there's no ether. Instead, people clung to the ether hypothesis
• 19:35
  Speaker 3: for a long time. They thought, maybe there's a blob
• 19:39
  Speaker 3: of ether and the Earth is dragging it along with it,
• 19:42
  Speaker 3: so we can't detect our velocity relative to the ether
• 19:45
  Speaker 3: because we're like in a little pocket of ether. And
• 19:48
  Speaker 3: we had to do all sorts of other studies to
• 19:50
  Speaker 3: disprove that by looking at like the angles of stars
• 19:53
  Speaker 3: and how they changed through the year. And so it
• 19:56
  Speaker 3: wasn't widely accepted until after Einstein's theory of relative nineteen
• 20:00
  Speaker 3: oh five, So this is twenty years later. Einstein comes
• 20:04
  Speaker 3: up with this theoretical explanation for this experiment, which brings
• 20:07
  Speaker 3: it all together and finally makes it all make sense.
• 20:09
  Speaker 3: And it wasn't until then that everybody's like, Okay, yeah,
• 20:12
  Speaker 3: I can put this together and this is the way
• 20:14
  Speaker 3: the universe works. Really, the physics establishment was like, well,
• 20:18
  Speaker 3: that was a strange experiment. We don't understand it. Let's
• 20:20
  Speaker 3: put it in the HM category until we figure it out.
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: Well, one, I think it's nice that they at least
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: paid attention to it, even if they put it in
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: the HUM category. It was red, so that's good. But
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: did Eminem survive until nineteen oh five to see the
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: work validated? Oh, good question, because it would have been
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: a delicious moment to know that you were right.
• 20:40
  Speaker 3: Yes, both of them lived on for decades longer, so
• 20:43
  Speaker 3: they definitely saw the theory of relativity become widely accepted.
• 20:46
  Speaker 7: Ah.
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: I love hearing that scientists get validation within their lifetime.
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: That's a good feeling. All right, let's take a break
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: and we'll talk about another discovery before bringing on our
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: other experts. All right, So in our last experiment, our
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: scientists were deliciously validated. Who is the next scientist we're
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: going to talk about?
• 21:24
  Speaker 3: So we're going to talk about another famous discovery, that
• 21:27
  Speaker 3: of pulsars by Joscelyn Bell Burnell. This is a really
• 21:31
  Speaker 3: fun story, but there's a nuance here that I think
• 21:34
  Speaker 3: is not widely appreciated, which is again, how long it
• 21:37
  Speaker 3: took to really accept this sort of surprising result. Jocelyn
• 21:42
  Speaker 3: Bell Burnell was a graduate student. She was studying quasars.
• 21:45
  Speaker 3: She was not out to look for pulsars. She was
• 21:48
  Speaker 3: looking for these huge jets that shoot out of black holes.
• 21:52
  Speaker 3: So black holes at the center of galaxies have accretion
• 21:54
  Speaker 3: disks stuff that's swirling around them, but they also shoot
• 21:57
  Speaker 3: material up their north and south pole. And these things
• 22:01
  Speaker 3: are called quasars, are super duper bright and for a
• 22:04
  Speaker 3: long time not really understood because nobody could understand where
• 22:07
  Speaker 3: the energy for creating such a bright source was coming from.
• 22:11
  Speaker 3: And she was studying these and wanting to understand their
• 22:13
  Speaker 3: time variation. Like you know how a star twinkles because
• 22:17
  Speaker 3: it goes through the atmosphere, These quasars radiate in the
• 22:20
  Speaker 3: radio spectrum, and she was looking for their scintillation due
• 22:24
  Speaker 3: to the interaction with the solar wind like particles in space.
• 22:28
  Speaker 3: So she built this huge radio telescope. And a radio
• 22:32
  Speaker 3: telescope is not like a telescope you looked through with
• 22:34
  Speaker 3: your eyeball. It's more like a huge antenna. And she
• 22:38
  Speaker 3: rolled out one hundred and twenty miles of wire over
• 22:41
  Speaker 3: like four and a half acres to build this big
• 22:43
  Speaker 3: radio antenna to capture this information and to try to
• 22:47
  Speaker 3: understand quasars.
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: You know, sometimes graduate students do just like absolute mind
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: blowing quantities of work, Like I imagine it took a
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: long time to lay all of that out. So oh yeah,
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: shout out to the grad students out there.
• 23:01
  Speaker 3: I know she did all the work on this. She
• 23:04
  Speaker 3: spent two years just building this telescope. And the data
• 23:07
  Speaker 3: is hilariously old fashioned. You know. You might imagine you're
• 23:11
  Speaker 3: sitting in your laptop, the data comes in, you're analyzing
• 23:13
  Speaker 3: it with some cool visuals. She had a printer which
• 23:16
  Speaker 3: produced one hundred feet of paper per day with the
• 23:19
  Speaker 3: data on it, and she like visually analyzed it and
• 23:22
  Speaker 3: looked for stuff like this.
• 23:24
  Speaker 7: Wow.
• 23:24
  Speaker 3: And on November twenty eighth, nineteen sixty seven, while looking
• 23:28
  Speaker 3: for Quasars. She saw something weird. She saw pulses separated
• 23:33
  Speaker 3: by regular time intervals from one location. So it's like
• 23:37
  Speaker 3: beep beep, beep beep, and this is really weird, right,
• 23:41
  Speaker 3: this is not the kind of thing you expect to
• 23:43
  Speaker 3: hear from the universe. You might expect to hear it
• 23:46
  Speaker 3: from like satellites or from radios or other artificial sources.
• 23:51
  Speaker 3: And so at first she nicknamed it in her notes
• 23:53
  Speaker 3: LGM one for Little Green Men. She was like, am
• 23:57
  Speaker 3: I getting signals from aliens? Here have I received the
• 24:01
  Speaker 3: first interstellar transmission.
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: It's interesting that the Little Green Men troope was around
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: that early. I guess I hadn't realized that we've been
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: imagining aliens as little green news for that long.
• 24:12
  Speaker 3: I think it comes from the history of like badly
• 24:15
  Speaker 3: informed fiction about life on Mars, doesn't it.
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: Oh, I don't know, Yeah, there's an episode we should do.
• 24:20
  Speaker 3: And so she was wondering, like, well, what are the
• 24:22
  Speaker 3: possible explanations for this other than alien's right, And so
• 24:27
  Speaker 3: they went through all sorts of cross checks to try
• 24:30
  Speaker 3: to understand what this is. So this is not like
• 24:33
  Speaker 3: Becquarel where she discovers this. She understands immediately what it is,
• 24:36
  Speaker 3: she goes and publishes it and then wins the Nobel Prize.
• 24:39
  Speaker 3: Now instead, she spent months thinking about ways she could
• 24:42
  Speaker 3: be fooling herself, Like, could this be signals reflected off
• 24:46
  Speaker 3: the moon? Right? Could this just be something from an
• 24:49
  Speaker 3: orbiting satellite. Could be like an effect from a big
• 24:52
  Speaker 3: building near the telescope, that's like gathering and focusing radio waves.
• 24:56
  Speaker 3: She thought about all of these things and like this
• 24:58
  Speaker 3: is good.
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: Science, right, yeah, good for her.
• 25:00
  Speaker 3: Think about all the ways that you could be fooling yourself,
• 25:03
  Speaker 3: because she didn't want to embarrass herself go off and
• 25:05
  Speaker 3: publish a paper about aliens. And then it turns out
• 25:07
  Speaker 3: it was just a tea kettle.
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: In the lounge, right, yeah, yeah, that would be embarrassing.
• 25:12
  Speaker 3: But finally it was confirmed with another radio telescope, so
• 25:15
  Speaker 3: she knew it wasn't instrumentation. But this took months. It
• 25:18
  Speaker 3: took a long time, and then finally people understood also
• 25:21
  Speaker 3: that it really was a signal, But it wasn't aliens.
• 25:24
  Speaker 3: These were just super fast spinning neutron stars that emit
• 25:28
  Speaker 3: beams along their poles, and then their poles sweep across
• 25:31
  Speaker 3: the surface of the earth leaving these regular blips in
• 25:34
  Speaker 3: the radio. So really an amazing and very important discovery
• 25:37
  Speaker 3: for which her advisor won the Nobel Prize. And she
• 25:40
  Speaker 3: didn't know.
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: That's what I was gonna guess. Is one of those
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: stories where the woman's advisor gets the credit. Ah cud.
• 25:48
  Speaker 3: Yeah, And she is so classy. She came to UCI
• 25:50
  Speaker 3: and talked about this, and she is very classy and
• 25:54
  Speaker 3: not bitter at all.
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: That's for her.
• 25:56
  Speaker 3: Anyway. It's a good story.
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: Well, it's an awful story, but a good Yeah, she
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: did great.
• 26:02
  Speaker 3: She's handled it very well. Yeah, okay, exactly, and a
• 26:04
  Speaker 3: really fascinating discovery and one that really took a long
• 26:08
  Speaker 3: time to verify that this is real, right, And that's
• 26:10
  Speaker 3: the thing I want people to understand, is like it's
• 26:13
  Speaker 3: very rare to have a moment where it's obvious that
• 26:15
  Speaker 3: you've discovered something and you really don't need to do
• 26:18
  Speaker 3: any other cross checks. But it does happen, and very
• 26:21
  Speaker 3: soon after the discovery of the pulsars, there was exactly
• 26:24
  Speaker 3: this kind of discovery. And while these folks were making
• 26:28
  Speaker 3: their discovery, they accidentally left a tape recorder on what
• 26:32
  Speaker 3: so we have audio you're gonna hear of folks making
• 26:35
  Speaker 3: a mind blowing discovery in real time.
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: Oh that's awesome.
• 26:38
  Speaker 3: So this story starts with Bell's discovery of the pulsars, right,
• 26:42
  Speaker 3: but these are in the radio, and people were wondering, like,
• 26:45
  Speaker 3: could you also have pulsars that are in the optical
• 26:49
  Speaker 3: that you could like see in a telescope. So John
• 26:52
  Speaker 3: Cock and Mike Disney were two theorists. These are not astronomers.
• 26:56
  Speaker 3: They didn't like know how to operate a telescope or
• 26:58
  Speaker 3: do data analysis. They were like, well, this is possible.
• 27:01
  Speaker 3: Let's give this a try. Let's go out there and
• 27:03
  Speaker 3: try some experiments. And so they got some time on
• 27:07
  Speaker 3: a telescope at kit Peek near Tucson, which is a
• 27:09
  Speaker 3: gorgeous place and anyone in Arizona should go up to
• 27:11
  Speaker 3: kit Peak. And they set up this machinery to convert
• 27:14
  Speaker 3: the flashes into ticks and then listen to it, which
• 27:17
  Speaker 3: is why they had a tape recorder going. But then
• 27:20
  Speaker 3: they converted the tics into frequency, and so they were
• 27:22
  Speaker 3: looking for a pulse on their a silloscope, looking for
• 27:24
  Speaker 3: like a little peak on their selescope. And they thought
• 27:27
  Speaker 3: they had it all set up, and they went up
• 27:29
  Speaker 3: there and they tried it and they saw nothing, and
• 27:30
  Speaker 3: they were very disappointed. And they had two more days
• 27:33
  Speaker 3: to do observations, and those two days were both cloudy,
• 27:36
  Speaker 3: so they lost out. And while it was cloudy, they
• 27:38
  Speaker 3: were going for walks and thinking about it, and they
• 27:40
  Speaker 3: realized they had a mistake in their calculation. They were
• 27:42
  Speaker 3: looking in the wrong place. But they didn't have any
• 27:45
  Speaker 3: more time. Oh no, Fortunately the next guy on the
• 27:49
  Speaker 3: telescope got sick and so he had to give up
• 27:51
  Speaker 3: his time. So they had one more night, and so
• 27:54
  Speaker 3: they went and they tried their new calculations, and they
• 27:56
  Speaker 3: plugged the thing in, and you know, they're just like
• 27:58
  Speaker 3: getting started. They just plug it in, turn it on. Okay,
• 28:01
  Speaker 3: let's get going. They didn't really expect to see something.
• 28:04
  Speaker 3: And as you'll hear in this audio, they're really surprised
• 28:08
  Speaker 3: to be making this discovery. So here it is the
• 28:10
  Speaker 3: audio of their discovery.
• 28:12
  Speaker 4: This next observation will be observation number eighteen. You've got
• 28:18
  Speaker 4: a bleeding pulse here. Hey, wow, you don't suppose that's
• 28:27
  Speaker 4: really working.
• 28:27
  Speaker 8: You can do sure bang in the middle of the periods,
• 28:31
  Speaker 8: but don't mean right bang the middle of scale.
• 28:34
  Speaker 7: I really looks something from the oven.
• 28:36
  Speaker 3: M it was growing too.
• 28:40
  Speaker 5: Let's been out the side of it too.
• 28:41
  Speaker 8: Here bottle, isn't it? Yeah, cookies, look a bleeding post.
• 28:51
  Speaker 8: It's growing, John, it is, Look it is. You're right.
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: This is so much fun.
• 28:57
  Speaker 3: I love also their mid Atlantic accents. It looks like
• 29:00
  Speaker 3: a bleeding pulse.
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure that's exactly the mid Atlantic accent that
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: I grew up with in New Jersey, but yes, it's
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: a fun accent.
• 29:09
  Speaker 3: I love listening to this. You know where they're trying
• 29:11
  Speaker 3: to convince themselves it can't be it, but it really is.
• 29:13
  Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, look at it's going. It's so exciting.
• 29:16
  Speaker 3: Way we did it.
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: We did it.
• 29:18
  Speaker 3: There really was nothing else that this could be. It
• 29:20
  Speaker 3: was exactly what they were hoping for and exactly the
• 29:23
  Speaker 3: place they thought they might be able to see it,
• 29:24
  Speaker 3: and it all worked and boom and they had it.
• 29:27
  Speaker 3: So sometimes you really do have those amazing moments of discovery.
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: Did they also get Nobels?
• 29:33
  Speaker 3: No, it helped us understand the crab nebula and it
• 29:35
  Speaker 3: was a really important result. But their discovery was in
• 29:38
  Speaker 3: sixty nine, and Bell discovered her first pulsar in sixty eight.
• 29:42
  Speaker 3: And in seventy four the Nobel Prize in Physics was
• 29:45
  Speaker 3: not given to any of these folks, only to the
• 29:47
  Speaker 3: advisor of Bell.
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: That is not cool, cool exactly. All right, Well, we've
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: now gone through some really exciting examples to give you,
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: like a real personal taste for what it's like to
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: make these discoveries.
• 30:02
  Speaker 3: Let's talk to somebody who's actual expert in discoveries, a
• 30:06
  Speaker 3: historian of science, a philosopher of science, who thinks about
• 30:09
  Speaker 3: the nature of discovery. So it's my pleasure to welcome
• 30:13
  Speaker 3: to the podcast professor and Lydia Patton. She's a professor
• 30:16
  Speaker 3: of philosophy at Virginia Tech, where she specializes in philosophy
• 30:19
  Speaker 3: of science and history of science, especially on the development
• 30:22
  Speaker 3: of experimental and formal methods. Some of her recent work
• 30:25
  Speaker 3: focuses on gravitational wave discoveries. Lydia, thank you very much
• 30:29
  Speaker 3: for joining us on the podcast.
• 30:31
  Speaker 5: Absolutely, it's great to talk to you.
• 30:33
  Speaker 3: So we are, too, scientists on this podcast talking about
• 30:36
  Speaker 3: our experience of discovery and our understanding of it. But
• 30:40
  Speaker 3: we're not experts in that right. We are scientists, doesn't
• 30:43
  Speaker 3: make us experts in like the history of science, philosophy
• 30:45
  Speaker 3: of science, which is why I want to invite you
• 30:47
  Speaker 3: on the show and ask you about the concept of
• 30:50
  Speaker 3: scientific discovery. Most people, I think, have a view of
• 30:54
  Speaker 3: discovery as sort of a Eureka moment. You see one thing,
• 30:58
  Speaker 3: you understand the universe is different from the way you
• 31:00
  Speaker 3: thought it was. It all clicks in your head, You
• 31:03
  Speaker 3: run down the street naked, shouting at the top of
• 31:05
  Speaker 3: your lungs. Everybody accepts it, and then we sort of
• 31:07
  Speaker 3: move on and make the next discovery. Is that real?
• 31:10
  Speaker 3: Does that really happen often? Or does that sort of
• 31:12
  Speaker 3: clash with the reality of the day to day working
• 31:15
  Speaker 3: of science. Yeah?
• 31:17
  Speaker 6: So, I mean our chimmedies supposedly did happen at least
• 31:21
  Speaker 6: once that someone did that. But I think there I
• 31:24
  Speaker 6: think there are moments when everything falls into place. And
• 31:30
  Speaker 6: the first thing that I think it's really easy to
• 31:33
  Speaker 6: understand is that those moments are often hard one. So
• 31:38
  Speaker 6: even the our Communities moment, it wasn't as if he
• 31:43
  Speaker 6: just came up with the concept of the lever came
• 31:45
  Speaker 6: up with the concept of displacement like out of nowhere.
• 31:48
  Speaker 6: He had been thinking about that for a long time.
• 31:50
  Speaker 6: And there are great sort of accounts of that in
• 31:53
  Speaker 6: the history of science.
• 31:54
  Speaker 3: So are you telling me this really happened, like we
• 31:56
  Speaker 3: actually have documented evidence that this happened.
• 31:59
  Speaker 5: Or oh, probably not, that's the no.
• 32:05
  Speaker 6: The myth is that he was in his bath tub,
• 32:08
  Speaker 6: which I you know, who knows whether they even have
• 32:11
  Speaker 6: bath tubs at the time, right, But and that's he
• 32:14
  Speaker 6: figured out the concept of displacement from something falling in
• 32:18
  Speaker 6: the water, and that that's why he was running through
• 32:20
  Speaker 6: the streets naked shouting eureka, like I figured But even
• 32:25
  Speaker 6: that story, which is probably apocryphal, he has to know
• 32:29
  Speaker 6: what he's looking for.
• 32:30
  Speaker 5: In the first place, Like he has to know why.
• 32:33
  Speaker 6: Like the average person if they just see something fall
• 32:35
  Speaker 6: in their bath water, are not going to say, oh,
• 32:37
  Speaker 6: this is a physics concept. You know, this is something
• 32:40
  Speaker 6: that that I can use to solve all these physics problems. Well,
• 32:43
  Speaker 6: you had to have a lot of training to even
• 32:45
  Speaker 6: recognize that that's the problem, and you had to have
• 32:48
  Speaker 6: a lot of background to even figure out like, Okay,
• 32:50
  Speaker 6: this is going to help me with mechanics, This is
• 32:52
  Speaker 6: going to help me with something with a problem that
• 32:54
  Speaker 6: I want to solve. And so I think that the
• 32:56
  Speaker 6: first thing is even with those kind of Eureka moments,
• 32:59
  Speaker 6: there's often, you know, five ten years of difficult training
• 33:03
  Speaker 6: and preparation in the background of them to even recognize
• 33:06
  Speaker 6: what it is when you see.
• 33:07
  Speaker 3: It, and not just training to recognize, but also lots
• 33:11
  Speaker 3: of failures, right, lots of moments where it didn't all
• 33:13
  Speaker 3: come together, things you tried that didn't.
• 33:15
  Speaker 6: Work, that didn't work out, and things that didn't solve
• 33:18
  Speaker 6: the problem. And it's like it. I mean, people often
• 33:21
  Speaker 6: use the example of solving a puzzle. That's not quite it,
• 33:24
  Speaker 6: but it's the idea, is you even if it is
• 33:28
  Speaker 6: something as simple as solving a puzzle, and I would
• 33:32
  Speaker 6: agree that science is more complicated than that. But even
• 33:35
  Speaker 6: with a puzzle solving metaphor, you have to try and
• 33:39
  Speaker 6: fail a whole bunch of times.
• 33:41
  Speaker 5: Before you start figuring it out.
• 33:42
  Speaker 6: Like if you think about when you were a kid
• 33:44
  Speaker 6: and you tried to do the Rubi's cue, it took
• 33:46
  Speaker 6: a long time to try to figure it out until
• 33:49
  Speaker 6: you could reliably do it.
• 33:51
  Speaker 5: And it's kind of the same thing.
• 33:52
  Speaker 3: Fascinating, and so even this canonical story, this Eureka moment,
• 33:56
  Speaker 3: is probably a story that's been made up to invey
• 34:00
  Speaker 3: to the general public. What this is, Like how long
• 34:03
  Speaker 3: has there been sort of this disconnect? Why are we
• 34:05
  Speaker 3: making up stories about how scientific discoveries happen? Like where
• 34:09
  Speaker 3: do these cartoon versions come from? And why do we
• 34:12
  Speaker 3: need them?
• 34:12
  Speaker 6: That is one of the biggest questions that I think
• 34:16
  Speaker 6: historians of science wrestle with philosophers of science.
• 34:19
  Speaker 5: Maybe a bit less, but philosophers of.
• 34:21
  Speaker 6: Science deal with something where we wonder a lot about
• 34:26
  Speaker 6: why we have a need for truth in science.
• 34:29
  Speaker 3: That seems like an obvious question, and it's an.
• 34:31
  Speaker 6: Obvious questions, but it's a tough question to answer. Why
• 34:35
  Speaker 6: do we want to think that science describes reality?
• 34:37
  Speaker 5: Right?
• 34:38
  Speaker 6: And so this is one of the biggest questions in
• 34:39
  Speaker 6: contemporary philosophy of science is why what makes us think
• 34:44
  Speaker 6: that the claims of science or claims about real things
• 34:48
  Speaker 6: that actually exist, or claims about truth or true claims.
• 34:52
  Speaker 6: And I think that there's something so seductive about truth
• 34:56
  Speaker 6: that the idea is that, for one thing, you can
• 34:58
  Speaker 6: use it to win any our argument, which to any
• 35:00
  Speaker 6: philosopher is going to be super attractive.
• 35:03
  Speaker 5: Right. It's like your sort of trump card.
• 35:06
  Speaker 6: You lay it down and you win the argument because
• 35:09
  Speaker 6: you have made a claim that's just true, and I
• 35:13
  Speaker 6: think that that's that kind of feeling, like, oh, now
• 35:17
  Speaker 6: I win any argument.
• 35:18
  Speaker 5: Now I just come out on top.
• 35:21
  Speaker 6: You know, if I end up in an argument on
• 35:23
  Speaker 6: social media, like if I just bring this out.
• 35:25
  Speaker 5: Everybody will have to agree that I'm right, you know.
• 35:28
  Speaker 6: And I think that kind of certainty is what's very attractive. Certainty,
• 35:35
  Speaker 6: winning the argument, being right, These are all very attractive things.
• 35:40
  Speaker 6: And I think that what's masked behind that. So, of course,
• 35:45
  Speaker 6: if we think of science as being the source of certainty,
• 35:48
  Speaker 6: the source of rightness, and a privileged source of being
• 35:52
  Speaker 6: able to win any argument, even a political or social argument.
• 35:56
  Speaker 6: If we think of science as being in that position,
• 36:00
  Speaker 6: then that means that if someone makes a scientific discovery
• 36:05
  Speaker 6: that gives us truth and certainty and ways of winning
• 36:09
  Speaker 6: the argument, then that sort of fits in with that
• 36:12
  Speaker 6: narrative that oh, okay, now we're on top, we're winning,
• 36:17
  Speaker 6: and we have this certain, true picture of the way
• 36:20
  Speaker 6: the world works, which is also extremely attractive.
• 36:23
  Speaker 3: I see. So it's compelling to imagine that truth is
• 36:26
  Speaker 3: revealed to us in these moments and that we can
• 36:29
  Speaker 3: share with people and be like, see, look, this is
• 36:31
  Speaker 3: the way the universe works. It's X and it's not y,
• 36:34
  Speaker 3: and the data itself will convince everyone that's the idea.
• 36:38
  Speaker 5: That's the idea. And there have been multiple examples of that.
• 36:41
  Speaker 6: One of my favorites is with somebody I've studied some
• 36:44
  Speaker 6: in my careers, someone named hermon Vun Helmholtz and who's
• 36:48
  Speaker 6: a German polymath. Really he physicists, philosopher, mathematician, many other things.
• 36:55
  Speaker 6: And one of the things that he did was in
• 36:59
  Speaker 6: the beginning of his career he really went after vitalism
• 37:02
  Speaker 6: and medicine, the idea that there's a kind of vital
• 37:05
  Speaker 6: force over and above the forces of metabolism and so
• 37:09
  Speaker 6: forth in the human body. And the thing is that
• 37:13
  Speaker 6: many medical systems, many medical approaches in like ancient Chinese medicine,
• 37:20
  Speaker 6: and in many traditional medical sort of paradigms, are based
• 37:24
  Speaker 6: on this idea of a life force, that what medicine
• 37:28
  Speaker 6: is doing is kind of helping the life force to
• 37:31
  Speaker 6: get stronger so that people will survive. And one of
• 37:34
  Speaker 6: the first things that Helmholtz did, and he wasn't even
• 37:36
  Speaker 6: a medical doctor, you know, was do a whole bunch
• 37:38
  Speaker 6: of experiments that disproved in his mind the vitalist hypothesis
• 37:46
  Speaker 6: and his achievement, in conjunction with the achievements of a
• 37:50
  Speaker 6: bunch of other people in that same vein, basically killed
• 37:53
  Speaker 6: the vitalist paradigm and.
• 37:56
  Speaker 5: It had a huge impact.
• 37:58
  Speaker 6: And so what happened was that people have this kind
• 38:00
  Speaker 6: of certainty like he had this kind of certainty. I
• 38:03
  Speaker 6: honestly look back at Helmholtz, and I think he didn't
• 38:06
  Speaker 6: really know. He was involved with a group of people
• 38:11
  Speaker 6: who the Berlin Physical Society. They thought that vitalism was
• 38:16
  Speaker 6: wrong and that everything should be explained by material processes
• 38:20
  Speaker 6: in the body and so forth. But they didn't have
• 38:22
  Speaker 6: any absolute proof of it, but they were seeking it,
• 38:25
  Speaker 6: and so that was what they wanted to find. And
• 38:28
  Speaker 6: so there's this kind of sense that if there's something
• 38:31
  Speaker 6: that you want to establish beyond any possible doubt, you
• 38:35
  Speaker 6: try to look for this eureka moment, You try to
• 38:37
  Speaker 6: look for this certainty in science, and that that's the
• 38:40
  Speaker 6: value of science. That's one account of the value of
• 38:43
  Speaker 6: science is that it gives you this kind of truth
• 38:45
  Speaker 6: and certainty that you're looking for.
• 38:47
  Speaker 3: That's just something a little bit troubling that you're more
• 38:50
  Speaker 3: likely to be convinced by something you expect to hear right,
• 38:54
  Speaker 3: which is maybe why it takes a long time to
• 38:56
  Speaker 3: accept some data which counters you or understanding, you know,
• 39:00
  Speaker 3: tectonic plates in the Michaelson Morley experiment. Why can't we
• 39:04
  Speaker 3: just let the data speak? Is there some part of
• 39:07
  Speaker 3: our science which is too subjective, which you know, makes
• 39:11
  Speaker 3: us skeptical of some discoveries and more accepting of others.
• 39:15
  Speaker 3: Is there a way we can upgrade our science to
• 39:18
  Speaker 3: make it less subjective?
• 39:20
  Speaker 7: Oh?
• 39:20
  Speaker 5: Yeah, that is That is a great and huge question.
• 39:23
  Speaker 6: I think why can't we I'll tackle why can't we
• 39:26
  Speaker 6: just let the data speak? Because to me, that is
• 39:29
  Speaker 6: that is one of the biggest questions that I look at.
• 39:32
  Speaker 6: Data does not speak in and of itself.
• 39:35
  Speaker 5: That's one.
• 39:36
  Speaker 6: There are a lot of people who say, well, oh
• 39:38
  Speaker 6: I'm evidence based. Oh I just go by what the
• 39:40
  Speaker 6: data said. Oh I just go And there's something to
• 39:42
  Speaker 6: be said for that. I mean, you do need to
• 39:44
  Speaker 6: test your claims against the evidence. If your claims just
• 39:48
  Speaker 6: keep getting refuted by obvious experiments, then either you need
• 39:52
  Speaker 6: to adjust your claims somehow, or you know. I mean
• 39:54
  Speaker 6: that I think everyone knows is the scientific method that
• 39:58
  Speaker 6: you have to part of a scientific meth method is
• 40:01
  Speaker 6: that if what you're saying just keeps being refuted by
• 40:04
  Speaker 6: experiments or tests, then it's wrong. But to say that
• 40:11
  Speaker 6: is not to say that you can gather new data
• 40:14
  Speaker 6: and immediately know everything about what it says. And a
• 40:18
  Speaker 6: lot of times even very high level scientists will say, look,
• 40:22
  Speaker 6: you know, we're running this experiment and one of the
• 40:24
  Speaker 6: most exciting things about it is that we're getting data
• 40:27
  Speaker 6: that even we don't understand.
• 40:29
  Speaker 5: You know, even.
• 40:30
  Speaker 6: We need a new paradigm or a new framework to
• 40:33
  Speaker 6: fit this in in order to understand what it's telling us.
• 40:36
  Speaker 6: It's like learning a new language. You know, you have
• 40:39
  Speaker 6: all of the information there, but you need to be
• 40:42
  Speaker 6: able to translate it into something to allow us to
• 40:45
  Speaker 6: understand what's happened. And I think there are a lot
• 40:48
  Speaker 6: of discoveries in science that worked that way, where a
• 40:51
  Speaker 6: lot of experiments, especially in science, that work that way,
• 40:54
  Speaker 6: where they were what Friedrich Steinley calls exploratory experiments where
• 40:59
  Speaker 6: people were just trying eyeing out different hypotheses, just testing
• 41:02
  Speaker 6: out what they might be able to find, and then
• 41:04
  Speaker 6: they get this data and it's really interesting data, but
• 41:07
  Speaker 6: they're not really sure what it means, and they have
• 41:09
  Speaker 6: to come up with a new explanation even to even
• 41:12
  Speaker 6: get the kind of the juice out of it, to
• 41:14
  Speaker 6: get the real information out of the data.
• 41:16
  Speaker 3: Well, so it sounds like you're telling me, and I
• 41:18
  Speaker 3: apologize for asking you to summarize or simplify an entire
• 41:22
  Speaker 3: like one hundred year long argument among philosophers, but it
• 41:26
  Speaker 3: sounds like you're telling me that there's no way to
• 41:28
  Speaker 3: be purely objective about science because the process of interpreting
• 41:32
  Speaker 3: data is inherently subjective or personal or dependent on your
• 41:38
  Speaker 3: point of view and the questions you're asking and the
• 41:40
  Speaker 3: explanations you're interested in accepting.
• 41:43
  Speaker 6: Okay, so that's a slight that's a somewhat provocative way
• 41:46
  Speaker 6: of putting way I just said, so I would somewhat
• 41:52
  Speaker 6: So the whole objectivity subjectivity debate is a big one.
• 41:56
  Speaker 6: And so what I would say is it's not so
• 41:59
  Speaker 6: much that you have to choose your subjective slant on
• 42:02
  Speaker 6: the data, but it is that even objective facts require
• 42:07
  Speaker 6: an interpretation of the data. So I think it's actually
• 42:11
  Speaker 6: kind of independent of the objective subjective divide. I think
• 42:15
  Speaker 6: it's that if a lot of you know, a lot
• 42:18
  Speaker 6: of times what you have is just like, this detector
• 42:23
  Speaker 6: clicked five times in a minute, Well, what does that mean?
• 42:27
  Speaker 5: We only know what that means.
• 42:30
  Speaker 6: We don't have It's not like we have to pick
• 42:31
  Speaker 6: what we think about it or what we expect or
• 42:34
  Speaker 6: what we want out of it. It's that even in
• 42:37
  Speaker 6: order to know what that means, why did the detector
• 42:39
  Speaker 6: click so many times? What's going on there? You need
• 42:43
  Speaker 6: to know what the setup of the experiment is. You
• 42:45
  Speaker 6: need to know what the theory is that it's trying
• 42:46
  Speaker 6: to test. You need to have some kind of framework
• 42:49
  Speaker 6: for interpretation. And that I think is the part that
• 42:52
  Speaker 6: sometimes gets confused is people think, well, that's just your opinion,
• 42:55
  Speaker 6: then that's not science, and like, well, no, the science
• 42:59
  Speaker 6: is in knowing all of that, like knowing how the
• 43:03
  Speaker 6: experiment works, what kind of information we can sort of
• 43:08
  Speaker 6: get from the data once we get it, and that
• 43:11
  Speaker 6: process doesn't have to be subjective, but it doesn't give
• 43:15
  Speaker 6: us objective results without any effort. I think that's really
• 43:19
  Speaker 6: where I see attention.
• 43:21
  Speaker 3: So science is sort of a complex and nuanced process.
• 43:25
  Speaker 3: But I think that a lot of people have the
• 43:27
  Speaker 3: impression that science sort of came into being all very quickly.
• 43:31
  Speaker 3: A few hundred years ago, when you know Galleo and
• 43:34
  Speaker 3: Bacon understood the importance of empiricism and doing experiments. Is
• 43:40
  Speaker 3: that a cartoonish, simplified version of the development of science.
• 43:43
  Speaker 3: Can you give us a sort of more nuanced view
• 43:45
  Speaker 3: of like how we came to develop this engine for discovery.
• 43:50
  Speaker 6: The process of coming to a scientific understanding didn't come
• 43:57
  Speaker 6: into being immediately, and even thinking of our understanding of
• 44:04
  Speaker 6: the world as scientific is a relatively recent phenomenon. So
• 44:10
  Speaker 6: most of the people who we think of as the
• 44:13
  Speaker 6: pioneers of the scientific method would have thought of themselves
• 44:15
  Speaker 6: as natural philosophers. The tradition of natural philosophy encompassed philosophy, science, theology,
• 44:23
  Speaker 6: just multiple ways of understanding the world. And the publication
• 44:28
  Speaker 6: of Newton, as you probably know, the publication of Newton,
• 44:31
  Speaker 6: where he introduces the laws of nature and the laws
• 44:33
  Speaker 6: of physics and so forth, was called the mathematical Principles
• 44:38
  Speaker 6: of natural philosophy, not the mathematical Principles of physics. And
• 44:42
  Speaker 6: so for a long time the idea was just we're
• 44:44
  Speaker 6: trying to understand the world. We're trying to understand things
• 44:48
  Speaker 6: from whatever perspective we may have, and the idea of science, however,
• 44:54
  Speaker 6: is extremely old. So you have even you know, some
• 44:59
  Speaker 6: of the ancient Greek philosophers talking about science, and so
• 45:05
  Speaker 6: the idea that it came into being with Bacon and
• 45:07
  Speaker 6: Galileo is actually even too recent, right, Like the idea
• 45:11
  Speaker 6: of scientific understanding is very old. But at the same time,
• 45:15
  Speaker 6: even people who were doing what we would think of
• 45:17
  Speaker 6: as pioneering science did so under the banner of another heading, right.
• 45:22
  Speaker 6: So it was really, in my view historically in the
• 45:26
  Speaker 6: eighteen hundreds that those two things started blending in an
• 45:31
  Speaker 6: institutional context to give us something like the modern idea
• 45:36
  Speaker 6: that there is a department or a faculty in the
• 45:38
  Speaker 6: university that is specifically devoted to science. And that's really
• 45:43
  Speaker 6: more of a professional idea than anything to do with
• 45:47
  Speaker 6: the essence of the way that science is carried out.
• 45:52
  Speaker 6: This is the briefest thing I can say about it.
• 45:54
  Speaker 6: If you spend a lot of time around historians of
• 45:57
  Speaker 6: philosophy of science, historians of science, you will realize that
• 46:01
  Speaker 6: the further back you get, the more complicated this all is,
• 46:05
  Speaker 6: and the more you find people in very different fields
• 46:09
  Speaker 6: contributing to science. You find people like Girta contributing to
• 46:13
  Speaker 6: plant science Schiller in the nineteenth century. They were cited
• 46:18
  Speaker 6: often by like major scientists in the German nineteenth century,
• 46:23
  Speaker 6: and we don't really know what to do with that
• 46:26
  Speaker 6: because we have a particular idea of the way of
• 46:31
  Speaker 6: who a scientist is and who gets to be a scientist,
• 46:36
  Speaker 6: and that person works at a certain type of university
• 46:39
  Speaker 6: or a research project, that person has certain types of
• 46:42
  Speaker 6: professional bona fides that we require, and historically that just
• 46:47
  Speaker 6: hasn't been true because that didn't exist. And so I
• 46:50
  Speaker 6: think that there's been much more of a broad, sort
• 46:53
  Speaker 6: of pluralistic understanding of what science is. The more you
• 46:56
  Speaker 6: sort of push things backwards. A lot of people were
• 46:59
  Speaker 6: doing research for like private corporations.
• 47:02
  Speaker 5: They were doing research.
• 47:03
  Speaker 6: I mean, if you look at Michael Faraday, you know
• 47:05
  Speaker 6: he was one of the most important people in the
• 47:07
  Speaker 6: history of electricity and magnetism, and a lot of his
• 47:10
  Speaker 6: work was done privately. It wasn't done at a university
• 47:13
  Speaker 6: because he didn't have university training. But that's one point,
• 47:17
  Speaker 6: that's the sort of historical point that science is very
• 47:20
  Speaker 6: complicated in it. The current understanding is actually very historically specific,
• 47:25
  Speaker 6: even though we think of it as again searching for
• 47:28
  Speaker 6: this kind of certainty and eternal truths. We think of
• 47:32
  Speaker 6: it as like the way to be a scientist, but
• 47:34
  Speaker 6: it's certainly not in history.
• 47:36
  Speaker 3: And Faraday's examples should give motivation to all the folks
• 47:39
  Speaker 3: out there who are amateur physicists coming up with their
• 47:42
  Speaker 3: own theories of everything in the garage, right, it.
• 47:44
  Speaker 6: Can happen one hundred percent. I mean, this is the
• 47:47
  Speaker 6: guy who came up with the motor. Basically, I think
• 47:52
  Speaker 6: that should be an example to anyone.
• 47:54
  Speaker 3: So you alluded earlier to this deep question in philosophy
• 47:57
  Speaker 3: about whether science is discovering truth. Is what we're learning
• 48:00
  Speaker 3: about the universe really universal? Does it reflect the way
• 48:03
  Speaker 3: we think? Fascinating question. I'd love to dig into it
• 48:06
  Speaker 3: in another episode, but I want to ask you a
• 48:08
  Speaker 3: related question, which is about the universality of the process
• 48:12
  Speaker 3: of science. We have this technique we've been building up
• 48:16
  Speaker 3: and evolving, this that developing to learn about the universe.
• 48:20
  Speaker 3: Do you think that it's likely that other intelligent civilized
• 48:24
  Speaker 3: races around the galaxy, for example, are doing science. You know,
• 48:29
  Speaker 3: I'm not asking is there a person they call a
• 48:31
  Speaker 3: scientist and do they have the same cultural institutions I
• 48:34
  Speaker 3: think that's very unlikely. But do you think they have
• 48:37
  Speaker 3: also stumbled on the process of building hypotheses, doing experiments
• 48:42
  Speaker 3: refining that. Do you think we're likely to find that
• 48:45
  Speaker 3: in alien species?
• 48:47
  Speaker 5: Oh, that's a great question. So I think one of
• 48:51
  Speaker 5: the things I think.
• 48:51
  Speaker 6: About that is that it's closely related to another question,
• 48:56
  Speaker 6: which is science inevitable in the way that we've developed it.
• 49:01
  Speaker 6: So on any planet, with any species, or even if
• 49:05
  Speaker 6: we went back and re ran the tape of our history,
• 49:10
  Speaker 6: would it all happen the same way? And I think
• 49:14
  Speaker 6: it wouldn't necessarily, even if the changes were just minor.
• 49:19
  Speaker 6: There are people who argue that certain formal features of
• 49:24
  Speaker 6: science would always inevitably be the same way. We would
• 49:27
  Speaker 6: always find some way to do experiments, we would always
• 49:29
  Speaker 6: find some way to test our claims, we would always
• 49:31
  Speaker 6: find some way to incorporate formal reasoning.
• 49:34
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 49:35
  Speaker 5: I'm not sure that's true.
• 49:36
  Speaker 3: It seems awfully flattering, right to say that the way
• 49:39
  Speaker 3: we're doing it has got to be the only way.
• 49:41
  Speaker 6: We are very triumphalist about our way of doing science.
• 49:47
  Speaker 6: We think that we have the way and that this
• 49:49
  Speaker 6: is the right way. And I think that sometimes people
• 49:52
  Speaker 6: cling to it as a way of solving our problems.
• 49:54
  Speaker 3: You know.
• 49:55
  Speaker 6: The idea is if we could just all get on board,
• 49:57
  Speaker 6: if everyone could just trust the science and tru scientists,
• 50:00
  Speaker 6: and we would all get And it's funny how the
• 50:02
  Speaker 6: people who get the most skeptical look in their eyes
• 50:04
  Speaker 6: when they hear this are scientists, right, They're.
• 50:06
  Speaker 5: Like us, why are we supposed to save everybody?
• 50:09
  Speaker 7: You know?
• 50:10
  Speaker 5: Like, what's wait a minute?
• 50:11
  Speaker 6: And I think that's one of the one of the
• 50:14
  Speaker 6: aspects of science that's kind of funny is that, you know,
• 50:17
  Speaker 6: what it shouldn't be required to do is save the world.
• 50:21
  Speaker 6: And I think we want it to, but it shouldn't
• 50:24
  Speaker 6: be required to It's a means of discovery. It's a
• 50:27
  Speaker 6: means of exploration. Now do I think that there would
• 50:30
  Speaker 6: be scientific discovery in any curious, intelligent species on other
• 50:37
  Speaker 6: planets or wherever they might be. Of course, yeah, right,
• 50:39
  Speaker 6: I mean I think in their own way, right, Like
• 50:42
  Speaker 6: bacteria explore and you know, this is something that, of
• 50:46
  Speaker 6: course a biologist would be better suited to talk about
• 50:49
  Speaker 6: in detail. But there are species that in their own
• 50:52
  Speaker 6: way are exploring, making experiments, figuring out which environments are better,
• 50:57
  Speaker 6: and we don't have any way of knowing whether they're
• 50:59
  Speaker 6: doing that intentionally or for what purpose. But I think
• 51:03
  Speaker 6: that it's a little condescending to assume that because we
• 51:07
  Speaker 6: don't know that they're not doing anything, you know, I
• 51:11
  Speaker 6: think even if we just look at our planet, there
• 51:14
  Speaker 6: are lots more species that are probably doing something closer
• 51:16
  Speaker 6: to the scientific method than we might think.
• 51:19
  Speaker 3: What's a good candidate to think.
• 51:21
  Speaker 6: Well, one of my colleagues at Virginia Tech, Ashley, she
• 51:24
  Speaker 6: did her dissertation on New Caledonian crows, that there is
• 51:27
  Speaker 6: other work on New Caledonian crows. I think they're a
• 51:30
  Speaker 6: good example of tool using creatures in any case, and
• 51:34
  Speaker 6: who have done.
• 51:35
  Speaker 5: If I were better versus in this area, I would
• 51:37
  Speaker 5: have lots more examples.
• 51:38
  Speaker 3: But just having many examples on Earth make an argument
• 51:41
  Speaker 3: that it's more likely to exist on other planets as well,
• 51:44
  Speaker 3: like other environments.
• 51:46
  Speaker 6: I would like for that to be true, because, as
• 51:48
  Speaker 6: you say, maybe you didn't intend to say this, but
• 51:51
  Speaker 6: it's his interpretation.
• 51:53
  Speaker 5: It kind of throws a mirror up to our own.
• 51:55
  Speaker 6: Practices and says, look again, what we want is this
• 52:00
  Speaker 6: idea of the inevitability of the scientific method in the
• 52:03
  Speaker 6: way that we've discovered it or developed it. The certainty
• 52:07
  Speaker 6: of science, the truth of science, the idea that we've
• 52:10
  Speaker 6: figured out the one right way. And I think the
• 52:14
  Speaker 6: triumphalism is a nice word for that. And I think
• 52:18
  Speaker 6: that thinking about, well, wait, what if they do it
• 52:22
  Speaker 6: differently elsewhere? What if there are other ways of doing this,
• 52:25
  Speaker 6: whether on the Earth or elsewhere in the galaxy. And
• 52:29
  Speaker 6: we're more able to reach out send signals to other
• 52:35
  Speaker 6: places now than we ever have been. And I think
• 52:39
  Speaker 6: that the possibility that there might be another way of
• 52:43
  Speaker 6: doing science, on the one hand, it sort of undermines
• 52:46
  Speaker 6: that idea of certainty and truth, and on the other hand,
• 52:49
  Speaker 6: that could be seen as a good thing.
• 52:51
  Speaker 5: That could be a good thing, wonderful.
• 52:53
  Speaker 3: Well, I look forward to all these developments in the
• 52:55
  Speaker 3: process of science itself and our social relationship with science.
• 53:00
  Speaker 3: To end by asking you one last question, and this
• 53:02
  Speaker 3: is going to be the most controversial, politically charged question.
• 53:06
  Speaker 3: I'm going to ask you, if you had to choose,
• 53:08
  Speaker 3: would you rather live in Virginia or California?
• 53:11
  Speaker 6: Oh? Oh, oh, my gosh, Okay, I mean but California.
• 53:22
  Speaker 3: Thank you, all right, excellent, you've come down on my
• 53:24
  Speaker 3: side of the argument. I appreciate it from a professor
• 53:27
  Speaker 3: in Virginia. All right, well, thank you very much for
• 53:30
  Speaker 3: coming on the pod and talking to us about the
• 53:32
  Speaker 3: process of science and discovery.
• 53:33
  Speaker 5: Absolutely, thank you, great to talk.
• 53:56
  Speaker 3: We're back and today we're talking about the process of
• 53:59
  Speaker 3: science discovery. Up next, we have a fun interview with
• 54:03
  Speaker 3: Professor Brian Keating, who's written a book about his interviews
• 54:06
  Speaker 3: with Nobel Prize laureates. So it's my pleasure to welcome
• 54:10
  Speaker 3: back to the podcast Professor Brian Keating. He's a cosmologist
• 54:14
  Speaker 3: and a distinguished professor of physics at University of California,
• 54:17
  Speaker 3: San Diego. He's also the co director of the Arthur C.
• 54:20
  Speaker 3: Clark Center for the Human Imagination. He's a principal investigator
• 54:24
  Speaker 3: of the Simons Observatory, and he has a side hustle
• 54:27
  Speaker 3: of writing books and doing podcasts. He's the author of
• 54:30
  Speaker 3: Losing the Nobel Prize of Into the Impossible of volume two,
• 54:35
  Speaker 3: focused like a Nobel Prize winner will be talking about today,
• 54:38
  Speaker 3: and he's the host of the End of the Impossible podcast.
• 54:41
  Speaker 3: So he's one of those rare unicorns that both does
• 54:44
  Speaker 3: physics research and talks about it to the public. Brian
• 54:47
  Speaker 3: welcome back to the pod.
• 54:48
  Speaker 2: Ah, it's great to see you, you know, yeah, it's
• 54:50
  Speaker 2: always great to be with you.
• 54:52
  Speaker 3: Wonderful. Well, I really enjoyed reading your book. It's fascinating
• 54:55
  Speaker 3: to hear these thoughts from all of these luminaries. My
• 54:58
  Speaker 3: first question to you is a simple one, though, like,
• 55:00
  Speaker 3: what is your secret for getting access to all these
• 55:03
  Speaker 3: Nobel Prize winners for young science journalists or aspiring podcasters
• 55:07
  Speaker 3: out there? How do you manage to set up these conversations?
• 55:11
  Speaker 2: Well, I think you know it's it's called the I
• 55:13
  Speaker 2: think it's called the Matthew effect. So say Matthew said,
• 55:17
  Speaker 2: the rich get richer effectively. So it started off, as
• 55:21
  Speaker 2: you said, with the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination,
• 55:24
  Speaker 2: and we were blessed here to have people like Freeman
• 55:26
  Speaker 2: Dyson and you know, a local on staff, and so
• 55:31
  Speaker 2: we just got to hang out. And to say he
• 55:33
  Speaker 2: was my first guest on the podcast is pretty awesome.
• 55:36
  Speaker 2: Awesome expression. I never thought would would you know, be
• 55:40
  Speaker 2: a thing that I could say. And then after you know,
• 55:42
  Speaker 2: getting people like him, then a Nobel laureate like Roger Penrose,
• 55:45
  Speaker 2: who I knew before he was a Nobel laureate.
• 55:48
  Speaker 7: Some say, you know, responsible for it, but that's just me.
• 55:52
  Speaker 3: People are saying, yeah.
• 55:54
  Speaker 7: The voices in my skull.
• 55:56
  Speaker 2: And then other just great luminaries would come to give
• 55:59
  Speaker 2: a colloquial very parish or you know, people like that.
• 56:03
  Speaker 2: And then I thought it was a real shame and
• 56:05
  Speaker 2: a disservice to the University of California, the people that
• 56:08
  Speaker 2: you and I serve so selflessly in such low wages,
• 56:12
  Speaker 2: that we you know, wouldn't share that with the California
• 56:16
  Speaker 2: taxpayers and with the locals that couldn't make it the campus.
• 56:18
  Speaker 2: And so decided to record audio and then later on
• 56:22
  Speaker 2: made it into videos. And then every time someone of
• 56:25
  Speaker 2: a great stature, whether a Nobel laureate or not, would
• 56:28
  Speaker 2: come by, I would ask them if they wouldn't mind
• 56:30
  Speaker 2: sitting for an interview. Well, you know, half of them
• 56:33
  Speaker 2: agreed to come on. Unfortunately I didn't have the opportunity.
• 56:35
  Speaker 2: There were only I think there's only four living women
• 56:38
  Speaker 2: who have won the Nobel Prize, and only I think
• 56:40
  Speaker 2: two are American or three are American, and so it
• 56:43
  Speaker 2: was hard to get you know them, especially because they
• 56:45
  Speaker 2: they're sick of getting asked.
• 56:46
  Speaker 7: So, what's it like?
• 56:47
  Speaker 2: To be a woman, you know, so I try not
• 56:50
  Speaker 2: to do that. So but for this volume, the second volume,
• 56:53
  Speaker 2: I did get the opportunity to speak to Donna Strickland,
• 56:56
  Speaker 2: who is an amazing experimentalist and hilarious and disarming and
• 57:01
  Speaker 2: ultimately incredibly gracious. I've interviewed twenty two so far, including
• 57:06
  Speaker 2: I have his.
• 57:07
  Speaker 7: Books, some maround.
• 57:08
  Speaker 2: Here the guy who invented viagra, doctor leuig Naro, who's
• 57:12
  Speaker 2: at UCLA not far from you. And here's my twenty
• 57:16
  Speaker 2: second interview. And after the second group of nine, so eighteen,
• 57:19
  Speaker 2: I decided I'd put out another volume.
• 57:21
  Speaker 7: And that's where we're at today.
• 57:23
  Speaker 3: So of all the people on the earth, or at
• 57:25
  Speaker 3: least the people I know, you've probably spoken to more
• 57:28
  Speaker 3: Nobel Prize winners than anybody.
• 57:30
  Speaker 7: I think that's tran.
• 57:31
  Speaker 3: You know. I want to dig into in a minute
• 57:33
  Speaker 3: what you think their methods have in common. But what
• 57:36
  Speaker 3: do you think there are moments of discovery have in common?
• 57:39
  Speaker 3: Do you think they all share this like Eureka moment
• 57:42
  Speaker 3: or do you think in each case it was like
• 57:43
  Speaker 3: a gradual understanding of this novel realization about the universe.
• 57:48
  Speaker 3: What are those moments have in common?
• 57:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, there's just a cliche from Isaac Asimov
• 57:52
  Speaker 2: that you know, a real scientist doesn't say eureka, because
• 57:56
  Speaker 2: that's kind of means I have found it in Greek,
• 57:59
  Speaker 2: as we all know, and uh, and that means you
• 58:01
  Speaker 2: found what you're looking for, which is the recipe for
• 58:03
  Speaker 2: confirmation bias, which we're not supposed to fall victim to.
• 58:07
  Speaker 2: So I think the you know, the reaction is more
• 58:10
  Speaker 2: more often than not, you know what I call sheer
• 58:12
  Speaker 2: terror of suspecting that you might be right, but with
• 58:17
  Speaker 2: so little confidence and conviction that you could be wrong.
• 58:21
  Speaker 2: And effectively that that least this type of paralysis where
• 58:24
  Speaker 2: you're like, not sure, and so what do you do
• 58:26
  Speaker 2: as a good science You just keep collecting data. And
• 58:28
  Speaker 2: I think the thing that separates these individuals from you
• 58:31
  Speaker 2: know me, I'll say, not you, but me, is that
• 58:35
  Speaker 2: they don't, you know, kind of they had this courage
• 58:37
  Speaker 2: to be you know, to lean into the discovery and
• 58:40
  Speaker 2: really you know, kind of reify it and make it,
• 58:44
  Speaker 2: make it whole. And and I think that that kind
• 58:46
  Speaker 2: of courage is rare. It's rare and individuals, let alone
• 58:49
  Speaker 2: and scientists. So I think that ability to see that
• 58:52
  Speaker 2: they've done enough that like the perfect is the enemy
• 58:54
  Speaker 2: of the good, enough that you know, once you've established
• 58:57
  Speaker 2: this thing, is now to you to kind of then
• 58:59
  Speaker 2: convert from scientists to what I call salesman mode, where
• 59:03
  Speaker 2: you really have to convince other scientists that you're right,
• 59:06
  Speaker 2: and it's not enough for you to think you're brilliant.
• 59:08
  Speaker 2: I mean, only one person in this whole collection of
• 59:11
  Speaker 2: twenty two people has admitted to me that they deserved
• 59:16
  Speaker 2: the Noble Prize. Like, you know, there was something they
• 59:18
  Speaker 2: were gone for their whole life. They knew where they
• 59:20
  Speaker 2: were going to win it. It was preternaturally preordained.
• 59:23
  Speaker 3: Yeah, So what do you think these folks have done
• 59:25
  Speaker 3: to prepare themselves for these moments, for these great discoveries.
• 59:28
  Speaker 3: Is it just luck? Or have they sort of made themselves?
• 59:31
  Speaker 3: Have they sort of set themselves up to be lucky?
• 59:34
  Speaker 2: Some say that they are lucky a lot just never
• 59:38
  Speaker 2: stop working on stuff, and the fact that they won
• 59:41
  Speaker 2: a Nobel Prize was sort of incidental that it was,
• 59:45
  Speaker 2: you know, it was something that they didn't plan on.
• 59:48
  Speaker 4: You know.
• 59:48
  Speaker 2: For example, I talked to Georgio Parisi, who you know,
• 59:51
  Speaker 2: won the Nobel Prize in part for you know, predictions
• 59:54
  Speaker 2: and theoretical physics ranging from spin glasses what are called
• 59:59
  Speaker 2: spin glass to your kind of chaotic invariance and chaos theory.
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 2: And there's a few people in the book that have
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 2: relevance to chaos theory. And so it's almost impossible to
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 2: kind of predict that I'm gonna, you know, go out
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 2: and solve this thing that has to do with how
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 2: these birds migrate called starlings, and how they flock and
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 2: the behavior and the phase transitions that they exhibit after
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 2: working on so ten symmetry group, after looking at spin
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 2: glasses and so forth. So a lot of them have
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 2: these very tortured paths to the Nobel Prize. But their
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 2: intellects are just such of such a magnitude that it's
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 2: sort of obvious.
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 7: In hindsight that they would get to this level.
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 3: And what about their daily habits? Is there anything they
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 3: have in common? You know, do they all start with
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 3: the same super espresso or do they all you know,
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 3: like block out timed for themselves, or is there anything
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 3: there that's like very concrete that we can extract from
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 3: their success.
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 2: Unfortunately, no, there's no like you know, special cereal, you know,
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 2: Wheedi's or sweeties or.
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 7: Something like that.
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 2: But there are you know, kind of traits I would
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 2: say there wouldn't say necessarily habits, although they all have
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 2: this you know, kind of chimeric ability to be incredibly
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 2: joyous when they're working. It's not a drudge. It's not
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 2: something that they do if that's tedious or and I
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 2: found it, you know, a little bit depressing, because what
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 2: we do is experimental scientists working on big projects. Almost
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 2: none of it, at least in my experiences, has to
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 2: do with physics. I mean, yesterday, we are on telecon
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 2: with my fellow you know, kind of co leaders, and
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 2: we're talking about like how to get these louvers that
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 2: open on the generators that power the Simons observatories, telescope
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 2: motor platforms when they get clogged with snow and you
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 2: want to you know, ingest the right volume of air
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 2: to cool the turbines. You have to cool them even
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 2: though you're you know, eight meters of snow fell this year,
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 2: you know, and so it's just like, oh, the concrete
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 2: you know, contractors on strike in Chile, which happens you know,
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 2: once a month it's the season or whatever, and then
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 2: we have to deal with so it's rare that we
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 2: get to spend time like thinking about the cosmic macure background.
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 2: And so I think the tenacity, the intellectual rigor, and
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 2: the desire to lean into teaching and service and giving
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 2: back after the prize, And I'm sure they did before
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 2: the prize too, But that's a commonality I observe in
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 2: their current state as I got to observe them collapsed
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 2: in that way from me.
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 3: And you draw another lesson from all of their experiences.
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 3: I mean, it's in the title of your book and
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 3: you go into it in great detail. You think that
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 3: folks should focus on a topic, that we should go
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 3: deep instead of broad as scientists. That's sort of clashes
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 3: with some historical trends, right, folks like Gauss or Newton,
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 3: you know, they're extremely broad. Why do you think that
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 3: today scientists have to focus have to be deeper?
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's the fields and the amount of
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 2: knowledge has expanded so much done it's it's basically impossible
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 2: even when you focus on one subfield, sub sub subfield
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 2: or you know, substances is a subfield, and to do that,
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 2: you know, it's easier to do that in one field
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 2: obviously than it is in Many, and I think it's
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 2: incredibly fascinating when you see that they could do so
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 2: many other things. You know, Ryan hard Genzel is a
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 2: great example, like he could have done any He actually
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 2: could have been an Olympic athlete. He was an incredible athlete.
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 2: His father was very into physical sports in Germany. And
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 2: you know, he could have done a lot of things,
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 2: not just in outside of science or in technology and optics.
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 2: You know, he really pioneered along with our colleague in
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 2: the University of California, Andrea I Guez, this this concept
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 2: application rather of adaptive optics to being up the black
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 2: hole in the Milky Way Center as a laboratory to
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 2: test general relativity.
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 7: So there's so many things there.
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 2: He could have gotten into optics, he could have gotten
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 2: into general relativity, experimental, he could have done more stuff.
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 7: But he could have also gone into.
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 2: You know, DARPA, and you know, would they use these
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 2: the same techniques in for example, in adaptive optics, where
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 2: we have these deformable mirrors that compensate for the distortion
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 2: of the Earth's lens like atmosphere that causes stars to twinkle, twinkle,
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 2: Little Star.
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 7: He could have applied that.
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 2: As they do now to like sniper scopes, you know,
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 2: which is an application of adaptive optics that you know
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 2: is for military purposes. But there's many other things, artificial guides.
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 7: A lot of the.
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 2: Technology was classified, you know in the US at least,
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 2: so he could have done a multitude of things.
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 7: But that's really what he's done.
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 2: And I think you know it's but it's he's only
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 2: he's the literal next generation after Charles Towns, also a
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 2: U see, you know, professor fellow of ours and and
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 2: he you know, is known for extremely broad knowledge. I mean,
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 2: he credits his his ability to blow glass. I don't
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 2: know if knew that he went to like house in
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 2: some small school had a like blow glass for you know,
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 2: champagne bottles, and then that became very useful in making
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 2: vacuum tubes for you know, eventually creating rarefied gas fials
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 2: that were then used to do maser stimulation. That led
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 2: to the mazer and then the laser, and then he
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 2: got into like looking for aliens and optical search for
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 2: extraterrestrial intelligence and adaptive optic just incredibly, so that was
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 2: one generation between him and his advisy is his student
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 2: Reinhart Gonzel and yet you know he could do it
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 2: and it was I don't think Reinhart's less intelligent. So yeah,
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 2: from my perspective, I think there's just so much to
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 2: know now, So it's hard to focus because so many distractions.
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 2: I'm not talking about outside the lot, I'm talking about
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 2: inside your own field.
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 7: How do you focus?
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 2: And I like this acronym that people you know use
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 2: that you know, focus should be thought of as an
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 2: acronym for follow one course until success, and I wish
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 2: I had done that. You know, I'm glad that I
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 2: have kind of a broad education, not just to within
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 2: physics but outside of physics. But I think there's a
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 2: lot greater path to success to do something that only
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 2: you can do.
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 3: But how do you know when to focus? Like, how
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 3: do you know as a young scientist that you found
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 3: the right field? Personally, I started out in plasma physics
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 3: and then solid state physics, and it wasn't until I
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 3: got to particle physics and I was like, oh, this
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 3: is my jam, this is where I want to dive deep.
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 3: So you know, if I had focused too early, i'd
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 3: be doing fusion research right now and promising you know,
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 3: the Tokomac would turn on and ignite next year for
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 3: the last ten years. So how do you know when
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 3: to focus?
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 2: So I think maybe you wouldn't in the sense that
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 2: you weren't really able to focus at the level of say,
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 2: you know, Michael Jordan practicing a thousand jump shots after
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 2: every game or something like that.
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 7: You know.
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 2: In other words, you had to find your path and
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 2: then you followed the course that led to success. In
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 2: your case, I was particle physics. I also started off
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 2: I want to be a condensed matter theorist. God forbid,
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 2: you know. Now I'm an experimental cosmologist. But I think
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 2: a lot of my success, at least are my ability
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 2: to maintain This is not the subject at all. I
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 2: think has nothing to do with the subject. So from
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 2: my perspective, the focus of the book is to implement
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 2: skills and tactics and habits and strategies so that you
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 2: can become an expert.
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 3: So there's this lore about big discoveries. I've often heard
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 3: people say that you can't make paradigm shifting discoveries after
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 3: you're thirty or something. So in your experience talking to folks,
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 3: did they make these discoveries when they were young or
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 3: is it after like decades of focusing and refining and
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 3: coming to the edge of the field that they've made
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 3: their discoveries.
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 7: Most of them did make it as young people.
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 2: Well, well here's the thing though, Well, first time we say,
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 2: I think that also correlates with what I said earlier,
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 2: that you know, you want to get on course early
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 2: in life. I don't necessarily correlate it with age as
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 2: well as I do with thinking yourself as a professional.
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 2: So getting on track early is I think, you know,
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 2: a cornerstone. So they all got on track that some
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 2: of them did, you know, kind of branch out either
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 2: after or at the same time, you know, most notably,
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 2: you know, I think Kip Thorn is probably the exception
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 2: that he really did the work that I want him
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 2: the Nobel Prize in his fifties, you know, if you'd
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 2: think about it. But the groundwork was laid in his
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 2: twenties and thirties, so I think that's important to know.
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 2: But but the way that they get to it, everyone
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 2: gets to Sweden in a different way.
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 3: So talking to all these folks, has it changed the
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 3: way that you do science?
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 2: Well, first of all, I had an unhealthy obsession with
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 2: the Nobel Prize as a as a kid, as a
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 2: young scientist, as I wrote about in my first book,
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 2: Losing the Nobel Prize, which is a memoir about, you know,
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 2: the bicep affair of thinking we discovered cosmic inflationary gravitational
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 2: waves and then having to re track that, and then
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 2: you know the aftermath of that, biting the dust as
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 2: you called it, very painfully.
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 7: So damn it. I'm still smarting from that.
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 2: But in reality, yeah, how do you recover? How do
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 2: you do science? How do you compete with your colleagues
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 2: and all sorts of nasty stuff about science that you
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 2: don't really ever get to see, because science is always
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 2: presented as you know, so and so had this brilliant idea,
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 2: and then so and so won the Nobel Prize, and
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 2: then this is now how we teach it, even our
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 2: labs at UCSD. I'm sure Ervine too, you know we're
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 2: teaching here's a Nobel Prize winning experiment, here's some of
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 2: these things took forty years to get to work, and
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 2: we just do it in an afternoon. So I think there,
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 2: it's changed my opinion that I don't venerate it. I
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 2: don't venerate the prize. The people are impressive, but they're
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 2: just people, and a lot of them. Bary Barrass wrote
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 2: the forward to the first volume, Think like a Nobel Prize,
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 2: and you know, he said that he had the imposter
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 2: syndrome even worse after he won the Nobel Prize than
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 2: he did before it.
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 7: I said, what are you talking about? He said, well,
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 7: when you went in.
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 2: About prize keating, you'll never know this feeling. But you
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 2: go to Stockholm and you get this huge gold medal,
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 2: like you know, flava flame, and they want to make
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 2: sure that you confirm that you got your prize due
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 2: to you, and so they make you sign this book,
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 2: this ledger that has every single Nobel laureate in physics
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 2: back to the beginning in nineteen o one with the
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 2: invention of the X ray by Wilhelm Renken. And so
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 2: Barry tells me in twenty you know, twenty twenty that
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 2: when he won it in twenty seventeen, he went there
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 2: and he's a curious guy and he's turns the pages
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 2: in the book and he sees, you know, oh my god,
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 2: there's there's fine man, Oh my god, there's you know,
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 2: Madame Currie, Oh my god, there's Einstein. And he said
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 2: that he saw Einstein's signature. He said, I don't deserve
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 2: to be in the same book as him, let alone,
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 2: you know, be in the same mention as him. And
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 2: I said, Barry, I've got good news, and good news
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 2: for you. First of all, Einstein had the imposter syndrome.
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 2: And he's like, what are you talking about. He's like Einstein.
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 2: I told him. Einstein wrote that Isaac Newton contributed more
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 2: to civilization than even he did to science, and his
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 2: contributions to science will never be matched again. And I said,
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 2: but that's not all, Arry, because Isaac Newton had the
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 2: imposter syndrome. And now he's like, oh, you gotta be kidding.
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 2: And then he said, I told him no. Actually, Isaac
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 2: Newton felt that he utterly failed to live up to
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 2: the standard set by his hero.
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 7: Wow Jesus Christ.
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 2: Okay, in fact, he reputedly died of virgin in order
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 2: to emulate the only way he could emulate. You know,
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 2: couldn't turn loaves into fishes, water into wine, but he
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 2: could die of virgin and in fact he did.
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 7: But some say that was because of his.
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 3: Personality, Like the first inel. That's right.
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 7: So it's changed me.
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 2: I think to not venerate the prize as much as
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 2: I do. Think it's type of idol on So one.
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 3: Of the things I like about your book is that
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 3: you look forward to the next generations and you imagine
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 3: that young people are reading it and thinking about their careers,
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 3: and so what is the takeaway for young readers? You
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 3: have to give them one piece of advice. To aspiring scientists,
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 3: or you're talking to your graduate students or prospective grad students,
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 3: what do you advise them about how to chart a
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 3: path through a changing field, you know, which is different
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 3: from the field that we grew up in and will
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 3: be different in twenty years. What is your advice to
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 3: the next generation.
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 7: That's exactly right.
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 2: So for me, it's all comes down to conservation laws
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 2: in this case, conservation of energy, you know, energy time,
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 2: whatever you want to say, and it's very hard to
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 2: but if you concentrate and you conserve, it's a form
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 2: of focus, right. I mean, you take a magnifying glass,
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 2: you take a light, you can concentrate the sunlight and
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 2: burn up those little worms that no, no, I'm just kidding.
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 2: I never do that out there. Peta but you can
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 2: melt an army man, right, You ever did that there?
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 7: Yeah, But you can't just hold them up in the sun.
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 2: So you have to concentrate, You have to focus, you
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 2: have to conserve it and narrow down. So for me,
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 2: it's prioritization. What is the most important thing on your plate?
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 2: Like do the hardest tasks that are most necessary. You know,
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 2: there's this Eisenhower matrix framework and an important urgent you know,
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 2: and whatever.
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 7: Different spectrum of tasks.
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 2: And you know, for me, it's like the most important
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 2: thing I think a young person can do is to
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 2: say no, because the better you are. You know, there's
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 2: there's a saying in the business world like if you
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 2: want something done right, ask someone who's too busy to
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 2: do it, because they're the ones that are. And you
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 2: know this, there's like only a handful of people on
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 2: an experiment that really do you know, ninety percent of
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 2: the work. There might be ten percent that do ninety
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 2: percent ork And those people they're so oversubscribed that their
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 2: energy is so drained or so distracted and they're so
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 2: you know, kind of torn by their eagerness to please
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 2: that they don't set boundaries, and so I really do
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 2: tell my students to concentrate, conserve, focus whatever you want
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 2: to say on energy, and do that by having appropriate
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 2: boundaries in time and in space.
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 3: All right, well, thanks very much. The book is called
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 3: Into the Impossible, Volume two Focus like end Nobel Prize winner,
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 3: Thanks very much for coming and telling us about all
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 3: the wisdom you've gleaned from all of these successful stories.
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 7: Thank you, Daniel.
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 2: I want to get back to your audience too, because
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 2: I love the audience and your audience is kind of
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 2: a key demographic. So for people that do get a
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 2: copy of this book, if you're in academia, I love
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 2: to give out these meteorites.
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 7: I think I've given them to Daniel.
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 3: I have one here on my shelf.
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 2: Yes, give them to your kids and so to get
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 2: one if you're in academia, like my ideal target demographic,
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 2: just go to Brian Keating dot com slash edu and
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 2: sign up for my mailing list, which I sent out
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 2: every Monday with some cool stuff including appearances like this
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 2: and thoughts on academia and life as a scientist, et cetera.
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 2: So Brian Kane dot com slash du with your edu
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 2: email address, and if you live in the USA, you
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 2: will get one of these beauties that was delivered by gravity,
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 2: not the US Postal Service.
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 3: I will deliver it amazing. And you can also catch
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 3: Brian on his podcast Into the Impossible. All right, Thanks
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 3: very much, Brian, Thanks Dan.
• 1:15:18
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