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

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Astronomy is the most visceral science

  Keating, a cosmologist at UC San Diego, notes that 'cosmos' comes from the Greek for beauty or appearance. We're born with two refracting telescopes in our skulls, the eyes, and Huberman adds that the retinas are brain tissue pushed out of the cranial vault during the first trimester. Cosmology appeals to our pull toward beginnings: the origin of the universe is the one event nothing could witness.

• 02

  Astrology fails the test of being falsifiable

  Your sign is set by the constellation behind the sun on your birthday, but the zodiac, dating back 5,000–6,000 years to the Babylonians, ignores Ophiuchus, which the sun passes through for about 17 days in late November and early December. Keating once told an astrologer he was a September-born Gemini and got the same reading anyway. In Karl Popper's terms astrology is unfalsifiable: it can accommodate any outcome.

• 03

  The sky was humanity's first clock

  Huberman explains that most animals track day length through melatonin from the pineal gland. Some birds and reptiles have thin skulls or pits that let light reach it directly, but in humans the gland sits deep in the brain and gets light information only through the eyes, so 'ear lights' won't reach it. Knowing whether days were lengthening mattered for a baby's survival, which Huberman suggests is one reason people charted the stars.

• 04

  Our edge is modeling the future, which also makes us find false patterns

  Keating notes that 'sapiens' means wisdom, not knowledge. Our strength is the prefrontal cortex's ability to run thought experiments and simulate outcomes. That same habit makes us confuse correlation with causation and fall for confirmation bias, which scientists must guard against most of all.

• 05

  Galileo is Keating's scientific hero

  Telescopes grew out of Dutch eyeglass-making, but their inventor only used them as spyglasses. In 1609 Galileo turned one, magnifying about 3–10 times, to the sky. He found mountains on the 'perfect' moon, saw Jupiter's moons, proposed the relativity of motion, invented the tripod, and paired an instrument with a testable hypothesis. Keating adds that Galileo wrongly argued the tides proved Earth moves.

• 06

  Refraction is light slowing in a medium

  Light travels about 300,000 km per second in a vacuum and slows in glass or water. Like a row of marching soldiers hitting water at an angle, the beam bends. That's why a coin in a fountain isn't where it looks, and why shaped lenses magnify.

• 07

  BICEP was Keating's lost Nobel

  With a $1 million gift from Caltech president David Baltimore's fund (about $10 million in total), Keating designed a microwave-transparent refracting telescope at the South Pole to look for gravitational-wave patterns in the cosmic microwave background, evidence of inflation, the theory of Alan Guth and Andrei Linde. The team announced a discovery at Harvard on St. Patrick's Day 2014 before peer review, for fear of being scooped by a billion-dollar satellite, and it was disproven within months. His book Losing the Nobel Prize tells the story.

• 08

  The South Pole is the best place on Earth to measure faint heat

  The target is a few billionths of a degree, so the 5,700-kelvin sun must be below the horizon, which it is for six months at a time. At 9,000 feet it's too cold for much humidity: all the water above it would condense to about a third of a millimeter, compared with roughly 25 mm over Los Angeles. That matters because water absorbs microwaves. Space-based telescopes cost about 1,000 to a million times more.

• 09

  The moon illusion

  The moon is always about half a degree wide, the same as the sun, which is why total solar eclipses are possible. It looks huge at the horizon only because buildings and trees give your brain something to compare it to. A pinky at arm's length (about half a degree) covers it either way, and a thumb covers about one degree. Keating adds that the moon drifts roughly a centimeter farther away each year, so total eclipses will eventually end.