How are scientific discoveries made?

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27:49All right. So in our last experiment, our scientists were deliciously validated. Who is the next scientist we're going to talk about? So we're going to talk about another famous discovery, that of pulsars by Jocelyn Bell Burnell. This is a really fun story, but there's a nuance here that I think is not widely appreciated, which is, again, how long it took to really accept this sort of surprising result. Jocelyn Bell Burnell was a graduate student. She was studying quasars. She was not out to look for pulsars. She was looking for these huge jets that shoot out of black holes. So black holes at the center of galaxies have accretion disks, stuff that's swirling around them, but they also shoot material up their north and south poles.

28:32And these things are called quasars, are super duper bright and for a long time not really understood because nobody could understand where the energy for creating such a bright source was coming from. And she was studying these and wanting to understand their time variation. Like you know how a star twinkles because it goes through the atmosphere? These quasars radiate in the radio spectrum. And she was looking for their scintillation due to the interaction with the solar wind, like particles in space. So she built this huge radio telescope. And a radio telescope is not like a telescope you look through with your eyeball.

29:07It's more like a huge antenna. and she rolled out 120 miles of wire over like four and a half acres to build this big radio antenna to capture this information and to try to understand quasars. You know, sometimes graduate students do just like absolute mind-blowing quantities of work. Like I imagine it took a long time to lay all of that out. So, oh yeah, shout out to the grad students out there. I know She did all the work on this. She spent two years just building this telescope. And the data is hilariously old-fashioned. You know, you might imagine you're sitting at your laptop, the data comes in, you're analyzing it with some cool visuals.

29:47She had a printer which produced 100 feet of paper per day with the data on it. And she like visually analyzed it and looked for stuff like this. Wow. And on November 28th, 1967, while looking for quasars, she saw something weird. she saw pulses separated by regular time intervals from one location. So it's like beep, beep, beep, beep. And this is really weird, right? This is not the kind of thing you expect to hear from the universe. You might expect to hear it from like satellites or from radios or other artificial sources. And so at first she nicknamed it in her notes, LGM-1 for little green men.

30:28She was like, am I getting signals from aliens here? Have I received the first interstellar transmission? It's interesting that the little green men trope was around that early. I guess I hadn't realized that we've been imagining aliens as little green dudes for that long. I think it comes from the history of, like, badly informed fiction about life on Mars, doesn't it? Oh, I don't know. Yeah. There's an episode we should do. And so she was wondering, like, well, what are the possible explanations for this other than aliens, right? And so they went through all sorts of cross-checks to try to understand what this is.

31:03So this is not like Becquerel, where she discovers this, she understands immediately what it is, she goes and publishes it, and then wins the Nobel Prize. No, instead, she spent months thinking about ways she could be fooling herself. Like, could this be signals reflected off the moon, right? Could this just be something from an orbiting satellite? Could it be like an effect from a big building near the telescope that's like gathering and focusing radio waves. She thought about all of these things. And like, this is good science, right? Yeah, good for her. Think about all the ways that you could be fooling yourself because she didn't want to embarrass herself, go off and publish a paper about aliens.

31:39And then it turns out it was just a tea kettle in the lounge, right? Yeah, yeah, that would be embarrassing. But finally, it was confirmed with another radio telescope. So she knew it wasn't instrumentation. But this took months, right? It took a long time. And then finally, people understood also that it really was a signal, but it wasn't aliens. These were just super fast spinning neutron stars that emit beams along their poles. And then their poles sweep across the surface of the earth, leaving these regular blips in the radio. So really an amazing and very important discovery for which her advisor won the Nobel prize and she didn't.

32:13Oh, that's what I was going to guess. Is this one of those stories where the woman's advisor gets the credit? Oh, crud. Yeah. And she is so classy. She came to UCI and talked about this. And she is very classy and not bitter at all. Good for her. Anyway, it's a good story. Well, it's an awful story, but a good, she did great. She's handled it very well. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And a really fascinating discovery and one that really took a long time to verify that this is real, right? And that's the thing I want people to understand is like, it's very rare to have a moment where it's obvious that you've discovered something and you really don't need to do any other cross checks.

32:51But it does happen. And very soon after the discovery of the pulsars, there was exactly this kind of discovery. And while these folks were making their discovery, they accidentally left a tape recorder on. So we have audio you're going to hear of folks making a mind-blowing discovery in real time. Oh, that's awesome. So this story starts with Bell's discovery of the pulsars, right? But these are in the radio. And people were wondering, like, could you also have pulsars that are in the optical that you could like see in a telescope. So John Cock and Mike Disney were two theorists. These are not astronomers.

33:28They didn't like know how to operate a telescope or do data analysis. They were like, well, this is possible. Let's give this a try. Let's go out there and try some experiments. And so they got some time on a telescope at Kitt Peak near Tucson, which is a gorgeous place and anyone in Arizona should go up to Kitt Peak. And they set up this machinery to convert the flashes into ticks and then listen to it, which is why they had a tape recorder going. But then they converted the ticks into frequency. And so they were looking for a pulse on their oscilloscope, looking for like a little peak on their oscilloscope.

33:58And they thought they had it all set up. And they went up there and they tried it and they saw nothing. And they were very disappointed. And they had two more days to do observations. And those two days were both cloudy. So they lost out. And while it was cloudy, they were going for walks and thinking about it. And they realized they had a mistake in their calculation. They were looking in the wrong place. But they didn't have any more time. Oh, no. So fortunately, the next guy on the telescope got sick. And so he had to give up his time. So they had one more night. And so they went and they tried their new calculations and they plugged the thing in.

34:29And, you know, they're just like getting started. They just like plug it in, turn it on. OK, let's get going. They didn't really expect to see something. And as you'll hear in this audio, they're really surprised to be making this discovery. So here it is, the audio of their discovery. This next observation will be observation number 18. You've got a bleeding pulse, yeah? Hey!

34:56Wow! You don't suppose that's really it, do you? It can't be. It's right bang in the middle of the period, but... I mean, right bang in the middle of the scale. It really looks something from here at the moment. Hmm. It's glowing, too. It's growing outside a bit, too. God, it is, isn't it?

35:22It's growing, John. It is. Look. It is. You're right. This is so much fun. I love also their mid-Atlantic accents. It looks like a bleeding pulse. Not sure that's exactly the mid-Atlantic accent that I grew up with in New Jersey. But yes, it's a fun accent. I love listening to this, you know, where they're trying to convince themselves it can't be it, but it really is. oh my gosh, look at it's going. It's so exciting. Yay, we did it. We did it. There really was nothing else that this could be. It was exactly what they were hoping for and exactly the place they thought they might be able to see it.

35:57And it all worked and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And they had it. So sometimes you really do have those amazing moments of discovery. Did they also get no bells? No, it helped us understand the Crab Nebula. And it was a really important result, but their discovery was in 69 and Bell discovered her first pulsar in 68. And And in 74, the Nobel Prize in Physics was not given to any of these folks, only to the advisor of Bell. That is not cool. Not cool, exactly. All right. Well, we've now gone through some really exciting examples to give you like a real personal taste for what it's like to make these discoveries.

36:34Let's talk to somebody who's an actual expert in discoveries, a historian of science, a philosopher of science who thinks about the nature of discovery. So it's my pleasure to welcome to the podcast, Professor Lydia Patton. She's a professor of philosophy at Virginia Tech, where she specializes in philosophy of science and history of science, especially on the development of experimental and formal methods. Some of her recent work focuses on gravitational wave discoveries. Lydia, thank you very much for joining us on the podcast. Absolutely. It's great to talk to you. So we are two scientists on this podcast talking about our experience of discovery and our understanding of it.

37:12but we're not experts in that, right? We are scientists, doesn't make us experts in like the history of science, philosophy of science, which is why I wanted to invite you on the show and ask you about the concept of scientific discovery. Most people, I think, have a view of discovery as sort of a eureka moment. You see one thing, you understand the universe is different from the way you thought it was, it all clicks in your head, you run down the street naked, shouting at the top of your lungs, everybody accepts it, and then we sort of move on and make the next discovery. Is that real? Does that really happen often?

37:43Or does it sort of clash with the reality of the day-to-day working of science? Yeah. So, I mean, Archimedes supposedly did happen at least once that someone did that. But I think there are moments when everything falls into place. And the first thing that I think is really easy to understand is that those moments are often part one. So even the Archimedes moment, it wasn't as if he just came up with the concept of the lever, came up with the concept of displacement, like out of nowhere. He had been thinking about that for a long time, and there are great sort of accounts of that in the history of science.

38:26So are you telling me this really happened? Like we actually have documented evidence that this happened, or this is apocryphal? Oh, probably not. No, okay. That's the, no, the myth is that he was in his bathtub, which I, you know, who knows whether they even had bathtubs at the time, right? And that he figured out the concept of displacement from something falling in the water. And that that's why he was running through the streets naked, shouting Eureka, like I figured. But even that story, which is probably apocryphal, he has to know what he's looking for in the first place. Like he has to know why, like the average person, if they just see something fall in their bathwater, are not going to say, oh, this is a physics concept.

39:11You know, this is something that I can use to solve all these physics problems. Well, you had to have a lot of training to even recognize that that's a problem. And you had to have a lot of background to even figure out like, OK, this is going to help me with mechanics. This is going to help me with something, with a problem that I want to solve. And so I think that the first thing is, even with those kind of eureka moments, there's often, you know, five, ten years of difficult training and preparation in the background of them to even recognize what it is when you see it. And not just training to recognize it, but also lots of failures, right?

39:44Lots of moments where it didn't all come together, things you tried that didn't work. That didn't work out and things that didn't solve the problem. And it's like, I mean, people often use the example of solving a puzzle. That's not quite it. But the idea is even if it is something as simple as solving a puzzle, and I would agree that science is more complicated than that, but even with a puzzle-solving metaphor, you have to try and fail a whole bunch of times before you start figuring it out. Like if you think about when you were a kid and you tried to do the Rubik's Cube, it took a long time to try to figure it out until you could reliably do it.

40:22And it's kind of the same thing. Fascinating. And so even this canonical story, this eureka moment, is probably a story that's been made up to convey to the general public what this is like. How long has there been sort of this disconnect? Why are we making up stories about how scientific discoveries happen? Like, where do these cartoon versions come from and why do we need them? That is one of the biggest questions that I think historians of science wrestle with. Philosophers of science may be a bit less, but philosophers of science deal with something where we wonder a lot about why we have a need for truth in science.

41:00That seems like an obvious question. It is an obvious question, but it's a tough question to answer. Why do we want to think that science describes reality, right? And so this is one of the biggest questions in contemporary philosophy of science is what makes us think that the claims of science are claims about real things that actually exist or claims about truth or true claims. And I think that there's something so seductive about truth that the idea is that for one thing, you can use it to win any argument, which to any philosopher is going to be super attractive. Right. It's like your sort of trump card.

41:39You lay it down and you win the argument because you have made a claim that's just true. And I think that that's that kind of feeling like, oh, now I win any argument. Now I just come out on top. You know, if I end up in an argument on social media, like if I just bring this out, everybody will have to agree that I'm right. And I think that kind of certainty is what's very attractive. Certainty, winning the argument, being right. These are all very attractive things. And I think that what's masked behind that. So, of course, if we think of science as being the source of certainty, the source of rightness, and a privileged source of being able to win any argument, even a political or a social argument, if we think of science as being in that position, then that means that if someone makes a scientific discovery that gives us truth and certainty and ways of winning the argument, then that sort of fits in with that narrative.

42:45that, oh, okay, now we're on top. We're winning. And we have this certain true picture of the way the world works, which is also extremely attractive. I see. So it's compelling to imagine that truth is revealed to us in these moments and that we can share with people and be like, see, look, this is the way the universe works. It's X and it's not Y. And the data itself will convince everyone. That's the idea. That's the idea. And there have been multiple examples of that. One of my favorites is with somebody I've studied some in my career is someone named Hermann von Helmholtz. And he was a German polymath, really.

43:23He was a physicist, philosopher, mathematician, many other things. And one of the things that he did was in the beginning of his career, he really went after vitalism in medicine. The idea that there's a kind of vital force over and above the forces of metabolism and so forth in the human body. And the thing is that many medical systems, many medical approaches in like ancient Chinese medicine and in many traditional medical sort of paradigms are based on this idea of a life force. That what medicine is doing is kind of helping the life force to get stronger so that people will survive. and one of the first things that Helmholtz did, and he wasn't even a medical doctor, was do a whole bunch of experiments that disproved in his mind the vitalist hypothesis.

44:18And his achievement in conjunction with the achievements of a bunch of other people in that same vein basically killed the vitalist paradigm. And it had a huge impact. And so what happened was that people had this kind of certainty, Like he had this kind of certainty. I honestly look back at Helmholtz and I think he didn't really know. He was involved with a group of people who the Berlin Physical Society, they thought that vitalism was wrong and that everything should be explained by, you know, material processes in the body and so forth. But they didn't have any absolute proof of it, but they were seeking it.

44:57And so that was what they wanted to find. And so there's this kind of sense that if there's something that you want to establish beyond any possible doubt, you try to look for this eureka moment. You try to look for this certainty in science. And that's the value of science. That's one account of the value of science is that it gives you this kind of truth and certainty that you're looking for. That suggests something a little bit troubling, that you're more likely to be convinced by something you expect to hear, right? Which is maybe why it takes a long time to accept some data which counters your understanding, you know, tectonic plates and the Michelson-Morley experiment.

45:35Why can't we just let the data speak? Is there some part of our science which is too subjective, which makes us skeptical of some discoveries and more accepting of others? Is there a way we can upgrade our science to make it less subjective? Okay, that is a great and huge question. I think why can't we, I'll tackle, why can't we just let the data speak? Because to me, that is one of the biggest questions that I look at. Data does not speak in and of itself. That's one. There are a lot of people who say, well, oh, I'm evidence-based. Oh, I just go by what the data said. Oh, I just go by. And there's something to be said for that.

46:15I mean, you do need to test your claims against the evidence. If your claims just keep getting refuted by obvious experiments, then either you need to adjust your claims somehow or, you know. I mean, that I think everyone knows is the scientific method that you have to, part of a scientific method, is that if what you're saying just keeps being refuted by experiments or tests, then it's wrong. But to say that is not to say that you can gather new data and immediately know everything about what it says. And a lot of times, even very high-level scientists will say, look, we're running this experiment.

46:56And one of the most exciting things about it is that we're getting data that even we don't understand. Even we need a new paradigm or a new framework to fit this in, in order to understand what it's telling us. It's like learning a new language. You have all of the information there, but you need to be able to translate it into something to allow us to understand what's happened. And I think there are a lot of discoveries in science that worked that way, where a lot of experiments, especially in science, that worked that way, where they were what Friedrich Steinle calls exploratory experiments, where people were just trying out different hypotheses, just testing out what they might be able to find.

47:36and then they get this data and it's really interesting data, but they're not really sure what it means. And they have to come up with a new explanation to even get the kind of the juice out of it, to get the real information out of the data. Wow, so it sounds like you're telling me, and I apologize for asking you to summarize or simplify an entire like 100 year long argument among philosophers, but it sounds like you're telling me there's no way to be purely objective about science because the process of interpreting data is inherently subjective or personal or dependent on your point of view and the questions you're asking and the explanations you're interested in accepting?

48:15Okay, so that's a somewhat provocative way of putting what I just said. So I would somewhat, so the whole objectivity-subjectivity debate is a big one. And so what I would say is it's not so much that you have to choose your subjective slant on the data, but it is that even objective facts require an interpretation of the data. So I think it's actually kind of independent of the objective-subjective divide. I think it's that if a lot of, you know, a lot of times what you have is just like this detector clicked five times in a minute. Well, what does that mean? We only know what that means. It's not like we have to pick what we think about it or what we expect or what we want out of it.

49:08It's that even in order to know what that means, why did the detector click so many times? What's going on there? You need to know what the setup of the experiment is. You need to know what the theory is that it's trying to test. You need to have some kind of framework for interpretation. And that, I think, is the part that sometimes gets confused, is people think, well, that's just your opinion then. That's not science. And like, well, no, the science is in knowing all of that, like knowing how the experiment works, what kind of information we can sort of get from the data once we get it. And that process doesn't have to be subjective, but it doesn't give us objective results without any effort.

49:50I think that's really where I see attention. So science is sort of a complex and nuanced process. But I think that a lot of people have the impression that science sort of came into being all very quickly a few hundred years ago when, you know, Galileo and Bacon understood the importance of empiricism and doing experiments. Is that a cartoonish, simplified version of the development of science? Can you give us a sort of more nuanced view of like how we came to develop this engine for discovery? The process of coming to a scientific understanding didn't come into being immediately. And even thinking of our understanding of the world as scientific is a relatively recent phenomenon.

50:40So most of the people who we think of as the pioneers of the scientific method would have thought of themselves as natural philosophers. The tradition of natural philosophy encompassed philosophy, science, theology, just multiple ways of understanding the world. And the publication of Newton, as you probably know, the publication of Newton where he introduces the laws of nature and the laws of physics and so forth, was called the mathematical principles of natural philosophy, not the mathematical principles of physics. And so for a long time, the idea was just we're trying to understand the world.

51:18We're trying to understand things from whatever perspective we may have. And the idea of science, however, is extremely old. So you have even, you know, some of the ancient Greek philosophers talking about science. And so the idea that it came into being with Bacon and Galileo is actually even too recent, right? Like the idea of a scientific understanding is very old. But at the same time, even people who were doing what we would think of as pioneering science did so under the banner of another heading, right? So it was really, in my view, historically in the 1800s that those two things started blending in an institutional context to give us something like the modern idea that there is a department or a faculty in the university that is specifically devoted to science.

52:14And that's really more of a professional idea than anything to do with the essence of the way that science is carried out. This is the briefest thing I can say about it. If you spend a lot of time around historians of philosophy of science, historians of science, you will realize that the further back you get, the more complicated this all is. And the more you find people in very different fields contributing to science. You find people like Goethe contributing to plant science. Schiller in the 19th century, they were cited often by major scientists in the German 19th century. And we don't really know what to do with that because we have a particular idea of who a scientist is and who gets to be a scientist.

53:07And that person works at a certain type of university or a research project. That person has certain types of professional bona fides that we require. And historically, that just hasn't been true because that didn't exist. And so I think that there's been much more of a broad sort of pluralistic understanding of what science is the more you sort of push things backwards. A lot of people were doing research for like private corporations. They were doing research. I mean, if you look at Michael Faraday, you know, he was one of the most important people in the history of electricity and magnetism.

53:41And a lot of his work was done privately. It wasn't done at a university because he didn't have university training. But that's one point. That's the sort of historical point that science is very complicated. And the current understanding is actually very historically specific, even though we think of it as, again, searching for this kind of certainty and eternal truths. We think of it as like the way to be a scientist, but it's certainly not in history. And Faraday's example should give motivation to all the folks out there who are amateur physicists coming up with their own theories of everything in the garage, right?

54:16It can happen. 100 percent. I mean, this is the guy who came up with the motor, basically. I think that should be an example to anyone. So you alluded earlier to this deep question in philosophy about whether science is discovering truth. Is what we're learning about the universe really universal? Does it reflect the way we think? Fascinating question. I'd love to dig into it in another episode. But I want to ask you a related question, which is about the universality of the process of science. We have this technique we've been building up and evolving and developing to learn about the universe.

54:51do you think that it's likely that other intelligent civilized races around the galaxy, for example, are doing science? I'm not asking, is there a person they call a scientist and do they have the same cultural institutions? I think that's very unlikely. But do you think they have also stumbled on the process of building hypotheses, doing experiments, refining that? Do you think we're likely to find that in alien species? Oh, that's a great question. So I think one of the things I think about that is that it's closely related to another question, which is, is science inevitable in the way that we've developed it?

55:32So on any planet with any species, or even if we went back and reran the tape of our history, would it all happen the same way? And I think it wouldn't necessarily, even if the changes were just minor. There are people who argue that certain formal features of science would always inevitably be the same way. We would always find some way to do experiments. We would always find some way to test our claims. We would always find some way to incorporate formal reasoning, right? I'm not sure that's true. It seems awfully flattering, right, to say that the way we're doing it has got to be the only way.

56:13We are very triumphalist about our way of doing science. Yeah. We think that we have the way and that this is the right way. And I think that sometimes people cling to it as a way of solving our problems. You know, the idea is if we could just all get on board, if everyone could just trust the science and trust the scientists and we would all get. And it's funny how the people who get the most skeptical look in their eyes when they hear this are scientists, right? They're like us. But why are we supposed to save everybody? You know, like what's. Wait a minute. And I think that's one of the one of the aspects of science that's kind of funny is that, you know, what it what it shouldn't be required to do is save the world.

56:53and I think we want it to but it shouldn't be required to it's a means of discovery it's a means of exploration now do I think that there would be scientific discovery in any curious intelligent species on other planets or wherever they might be of course yeah right I mean I think in their own way right like bacteria explore and you know this is something that of course of biologists would be better suited to talk about in detail. But there are species that, in their own way, are exploring, making experiments, figuring out which environments are better. And we don't have any way of knowing whether they're doing that intentionally or for what purpose.

57:34But I think that it's a little condescending to assume that because we don't know that they're not doing anything. You know, I think even if we just look at our planet, there are lots more species that are probably doing something closer to the scientific method than we might think. What's a good candidate, do you think? Well, one of my colleagues at Virginia Tech, Ashley Hsu, did her dissertation on New Caledonian crows. There is other work on New Caledonian crows. I think they're a good example of tool-using creatures in any case and who have done... If I were better versed in this area, I would have a lot more examples.

58:10But does having many examples on Earth make an argument that it's more likely to exist on other planets as well, like other environments? I would like for that to be true because it, as you say, maybe you didn't intend to say this, but it's his interpretation, it kind of throws a mirror up to our own practices and says, look, again, what we want is this idea of the inevitability of the scientific method in the way that we've discovered it or developed it. The certainty of science, the truth of science, the idea that we've figured out the one right way. And I think the triumphalism is a nice word for that.

58:49And I think that thinking about, well, wait, what if they do it differently elsewhere? What if there are other ways of doing this, whether on the earth or elsewhere in the galaxy? And we're more able to reach out, send signals to other places now than we ever have been. And I think that the possibility that there might be another way of doing science, on the one hand, it sort of undermines that idea of certainty and truth. And on the other hand, that could be seen as a good thing. That could be a good thing. Wonderful. Well, I look forward to all these developments in the process of science itself and our social relationship with science.

59:31I want to end by asking you one last question, and this is going to be the most controversial, politically charged question I'm going to ask you. Okay. If you had to choose, would you rather live in Virginia or California? Oh. Oh. Oh, my gosh. I mean, but California.

59:53Thank you. All right. Excellent. You've come down on my side of the argument. I appreciate it. From a professor in Virginia. All right. Well, thank you very much for coming on the pod and talking to us about the process of science and discovery. Absolutely. Thank you. Great to talk.

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1:01:28with Yamanika. Do you know I just found out who Sydney Sweeney was? New episodes weekly every Wednesday as part of my new network, the Dear Chelsea Network. If he got a bunch of women, then I should have a bunch of men. Do better or do less so I don't have to do so much. So join Yamanika each episode as she answers one question. Who's the problem? I'm Yamanika and I'm out. Listen to You're the Problem with Yamanika on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:02:02What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y 'all? It's your girl, Sam Jay. And we're the hosts of Everyone Watches Women's Sports, a new podcast from Together and I Heart Women's Sports. Because let's be real, women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days. So Kelsey Finler, she became the first female solo rower to go from California to Hawaii. My first thought is, like, what's up with the snacks? Like, what are we eating? The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments that take over your entire timeline. And the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week.

1:02:36Every week, we're breaking down the biggest stories across women's sports. Naomi Osaka showing out. She beat Sabalenka. Shout out to you, Naomi. You get the palm, Naomi. You get the palm for that. Because we're not just interested in what happened. We're interested in why everyone's talking about it. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:03:24Breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process. How did any of this get made? Why do we think that was a good idea? We're ready to talk about it. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Kreisel, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song, a melody. Well, I thought he was going to write, I thought you were all going to write a song.

1:03:59I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia A-O Rewatch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:04:22We're back, and today we're talking about the process of scientific discovery. Up next, we have a fun interview with Professor Brian Keating, who's written a book about his interviews with Nobel Prize laureates. So it's my pleasure to welcome back to the podcast Professor Brian Keating. He's a cosmologist and a distinguished professor of physics at University of California, San Diego. He's also the co-director of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for the Human Imagination. He's a principal investigator of the Simons Observatory. And he has a side hustle of writing books and doing podcasts. He's the author of Losing the Nobel Prize, of Into the Impossible, and of Volume 2, Focus Like a Nobel Prize winner, we'll be talking about today.

1:05:03And he's the host of the Into the Impossible podcast. So he's one of those rare unicorns that both does physics research and talks about it to the public. Brian, welcome back to the pod. Ah, it's great to see you. You know, it's always great to be with you. Wonderful. Well, I really enjoyed reading your book. It's fascinating to hear these thoughts from all of these luminaries. My first question to you is a simple one, though. Like, what is your secret for getting access to all these Nobel Prize winners for young science journalists or aspiring podcasters out there? How do you manage to set up these conversations?

1:05:36Well, I think, you know, it's called the, I think it's called the Matthew effect. So St. Matthew said, the rich get richer, effectively. So it started off, as you said, with the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination. And we were blessed here to have people like Freeman Dyson and, you know, local on staff. And so we just got to hang out and to say he was my first guest on the podcast is pretty awesome, awesome expression. I never thought would would, you know, be the thing that I could say. And then after, you know, getting people like him, then a Nobel laureate like, you know, Roger Penrose, who I knew before he was a Nobel laureate.

1:06:14Some say, you know, responsible for it. But that's just me. People are saying, yeah. The voice is in my skull. And then other just great luminaries would come to give a colloquium. colloquium, Barry Barish, or people like that. And then I felt it was a real shame and a disservice to the University of California, the people that you and I serve so selflessly in such low wages, that we wouldn't share that with the California taxpayers and with the locals that couldn't make it to campus. And so decided to record audio and then later on made it into videos. And then every time someone of a great stature, whether a Nobel laureate or not, would come by, I would ask them if they wouldn't mind sitting for an interview.

1:06:58Well, you know, half of them agreed to come on. Unfortunately, I didn't have the opportunity. There were only, I think there's only four living women who have won the Nobel Prize. And only, I think, two are American or three are American. And so it was hard to get, you know, them especially because they're sick of getting asked, what's it like to be a woman, you know? So I try not to do that. But for this volume, the second volume, I did get the opportunity to speak to Donna Strickland, who's an amazing experimentalist and hilarious and disarming and ultimately incredibly gracious. I've interviewed 22 so far, including, I have his book somewhere around here, the guy who invented Viagra, Dr.

1:07:37Lou Ignaro, who's at UCLA, not far from you. And he's my 22nd interview. And after the second group of nine, so 18, I decided I'd put out another volume. And that's where we're at today. So of all the people on the earth, or at least the people I know, you've probably spoken to more Nobel Prize winners than anybody. I think that's true. And, you know, I want to dig into in a minute what you think their methods have in common. But what do you think their moments of discovery have in common? Do you think they all share this, like, eureka moment? Or do you think in each case it was like a gradual understanding of this novel realization about the universe?

1:08:14What do those moments have in common? Yeah, I mean, there's this cliche from Isaac Asimov that, you know, a real scientist doesn't say Eureka because that's kind of means I have found it in Greek, as we all know. And that means you found what you're looking for, which is the recipe for confirmation bias, which we're not supposed to fall victim to. So I think the, you know, the reaction is more often than not, you know, what I call sheer terror of suspecting that you might be right, but with so little confidence and conviction that you could be wrong. And effectively, that leaves this type of paralysis where you're like, not sure.

1:08:51And so what do you do as a good sign? You just keep collecting data. And I think the thing that separates these individuals from, you know, me, I'll say, not you, but me, is that they don't, you know, kind of, they had this courage to be, you know, to lean into the discovery and really, you know, kind of reify it and make it whole. And I think that kind of courage is rare. It's rare in individuals, let alone in scientists. So I think that ability to see that they've done enough, that like the perfect is the enemy of the good enough, that, you know, once you've established this thing, it's now up to you to kind of then convert from scientists to what I call salesman mode, where you really have to convince other scientists that you're right.

1:09:32And it's not enough for you to think you're brilliant. I mean, only one person in this whole collection of 22 people has admitted to me that they deserve the Nobel Prize. Like, you know, it was something they were gunned for their whole life. They knew where they were going to win it. It was preternaturally preordained. So what do you think these folks have done to prepare themselves for these moments, for these great discoveries? Is it just luck or have they sort of made themselves, have they sort of set themselves up to be lucky? Some say that they are lucky. A lot just never stopped working on stuff.

1:10:05And the fact that they won a Nobel Prize was sort of incidental, that it was, you know, it was something that they didn't plan on. You know, for example, I talked to Giorgio Parisi, who, you know, won the Nobel Prize in part for, you know, predictions and theoretical physics, ranging from spin glasses, what are called spin glasses, to, you know, kind of chaotic invariance and chaos theory. And there's a few people in the book that have relevance to chaos theory. And so it's almost impossible to kind of predict that I'm going to go out and solve this thing that has to do with how these birds migrate called starlings and how they flock and the behavior and the phase transitions that they exhibit after working on SO10 symmetry group, after looking at spin glasses and so forth.

1:10:54So a lot of them have these very tortured paths to the Nobel Prize, but their intellects are just of such a magnitude that it's sort of obvious in hindsight that they would get to this level. And what about their daily habits? Is there anything they have in common? Do they all start with the same super espresso, or do they all block out time for themselves? Is there anything there that's very concrete that we can extract from their success? Unfortunately, no. There's no like, you know, special cereal, you know, Wheaties or Sweeties or something like that. But there are, you know, kind of traits, I would say.

1:11:37I wouldn't say necessarily habits, although they all have this, you know, kind of chimeric ability to be incredibly joyous when they're working. It's not a drudge. It's not something that they do that's tedious or – And I found it, you know, a little bit depressing because what we do as experimental scientists working on big projects, almost none of it, at least in my experience, has to do with physics. I mean, yesterday we are on telecon with my fellow, you know, kind of co-leaders and we're talking about like how to get these louvers that open on the generators that power the Simons Observatories telescope motor platforms when they get clogged with snow and you want to, you know, ingest the right volume of air to cool the turbines.

1:12:23You have to cool them even though you're, you know, eight meters of snow fell this year, you know. And so it's just like, or the concrete, you know, contractors on strike in Chile, which happens, you know, once a month. It's the season or whatever. And then we have to deal with it. So it's rare that we get to spend time, like, thinking about the cosmic microwave background. And so I think the tenacity, the intellectual rigor, and the desire to lean into teaching and service and giving back after the prize. And I'm sure they did before the prize, too. But that's the commonality I observe in their current state as I observe them collapsed in that wave function.

1:12:57And you draw another lesson from all of their experiences. I mean, it's in the title of your book, and you go into it in great detail. You think that folks should focus on a topic, that we should go deep instead of broad as scientists. That sort of clashes with some historical trends, right? Folks like Gauss or Newton, you know, they're extremely broad. Why do you think that today scientists have to focus, have to be deeper? Yeah, I think it's the fields and the amount of knowledge has expanded so much done. It's basically impossible even when you focus on one subfield, sub, sub, subfield, or, you know, sub, sub, sub, subfield.

1:13:35And to do that, you know, it's easier to do that in one field, obviously, than it is in many. And I think it's incredibly fascinating when you see that they could do so many other things. You know, Reinhard Gensel is a great example. Like, he could have done any, he actually could have been an Olympic athlete. He was an incredible athlete. His father was very into physical sports in Germany. And, you know, he could have done a lot of things, not just in outside of science or in technology and optics. You know, he really pioneered, along with our colleague in the University of California, Andrea Ghez, this application, rather, of adaptive optics to looking at the black hole in the Milky Way Center as a laboratory to test general relativity.

1:14:20So there's so many things there. He could have gotten into optics he could have gone into uh general relativity experimentally he could have done more stuff but he could have also gone in into you know darpa and you know would they use these the same techniques in for example in adaptive optics where you have these deformable mirrors that compensate for the distortion of the earth's lens-like atmosphere that causes stars to twinkle twinkle little star um he could have applied that as they do now to like sniper scopes uh you know which is an application of adaptive optics that, you know, is for military purposes.

1:14:55But there's many other things, artificial guides. A lot of the technology was classified, you know, in the U.S. at least. So he could have done a multitude of things. But that's really what he's done. And I think, you know, but he's the literal next generation after Charles Towns, also a UC, you know, professor, fellow of ours. And he, you know, is known for extremely broad knowledge and reasoning. I mean, he credits his ability to blow glass. I don't know if he knew that. He went to like Towson or some small school, had to like blow glass for, you know, champagne bottles. And then that became very useful in making vacuum tubes for, you know, eventually creating rarefied gas vials that were then used to do maser stimulation that led to the maser and then the laser.

1:15:45and then he got into like looking for aliens and optical search for extraterrestrial intelligence and adaptive optics it was just incredibly so that was one generation between him and his his advisee his his student uh reinhardt genzel and yeah you know he could do it and it was i don't think reinhardt's less intelligent so yeah from my perspective i think there's just so much to know now so it's hard to focus because so many distractions i'm not talking about outside the I've been talking about inside your own field. How do you focus? And I like this acronym that people, you know, use that, you know, focus should be thought of as an acronym for follow one course until successful.

1:16:26And I wish I had done that. You know, I'm glad that I have kind of a broad education, not just within physics, but outside of physics. But I think there's a lot greater path to success to do something that only you can do. But how do you know when to focus? Like, how do you know as a young scientist that you found the right field? Personally, I started out in plasma physics and then solid state physics. And it wasn't until I got to particle physics that I was like, oh, this is my jam. This is where I want to dive deep. So, you know, if I had focused too early, I'd be doing fusion research right now and promising, you know, the tokamak would turn on and ignite next year for the last 10 years.

1:17:03So how do you know when to focus? So I think maybe you wouldn't in the sense that you weren't really able to focus at the level of, say, you know, Michael Jordan practicing a thousand jump shots after every game or something like that. You know, in other words, you had to find your path and then you followed the course that led to success. In your case, that was particle physics. I also started off, I want to be a condensed matter theorist, God forbid. You know, now I'm an experimental cosmologist. But I think a lot of my success, at least, or my ability to maintain this is not the subject at all.

1:17:41I think it has nothing to do with the subject. So from my perspective, the focus of the book is to implement skills and tactics and habits and strategies so that you can become an expert. So there's this lore about big discoveries. I've often heard people say that you can't make paradigm-shifting discoveries after you're 30 or something. Yeah. So in your experience talking to folks, did they make these discoveries when they were young? Or is it after like decades of focusing and refining and coming to the edge of the field that they've made their discoveries? Most of them did make it as young people.

1:18:18Well, here's the thing, though. Well, first let me say I think that also correlates with what I said earlier that, you know, you want to get on course early in life. I don't necessarily correlate it with age as well as I do with thinking of yourself as a professional. So getting on track early is, I think, you know, a cornerstone. So they all got on track. Some of them did, you know, kind of branch out either after or at the same time. You know, most notably, you know, I think Kip Thorne is probably the exception. He really did the work that won him the Nobel Prize in his 50s, you know, if you think about it.

1:18:53But the groundwork was laid in his 20s and 30s. So I think that's important to know. But the way that they get to it, everyone gets to Sweden in a different way. So talking to all these folks, has it changed the way that you do science? Well, first of all, I had an unhealthy obsession with the Nobel Prize. As a kid, as a young scientist, as I wrote about in my first book, losing the Nobel Prize, which is a memoir about the bicep affair of thinking we discovered cosmic inflationary gravitational waves and then having to retract that and then, you know, the aftermath of that, biting the dust, as you called it.

1:19:31Very painfully so, Daniel. I'm still smarting from that. But in reality, yeah, how do you recover? How do you do science? How do you compete with your colleagues? All sorts of nasty stuff about science that you don't really ever get to see because science is always presented as, you know, so-and-so had this brilliant idea and then so-and-so won the Nobel Prize and then this is now how we teach it. Even our labs at UCSD, I'm sure Irvine too, you know, we're teaching, here's a Nobel Prize winning experiment. Here's a Nobel Prize. Some of these things took 40 years to get to work and we just do it in an afternoon.

1:20:03So I think it's changed my opinion that I don't venerate it. I don't venerate the prize. The people are impressive, but they're just people. And a lot of them, Barry Barish wrote the foreword to the first volume, Think Like a Nobel Prize. And, you know, he said that he had the imposter syndrome even worse after he won the Nobel Prize than he did before it. I said, what are you talking about? He said, well, when you win a Nobel Prize, Keating, you'll never know this feeling, but you go to Stockholm and you get this huge gold medal, like, you know, Flava Flav. And they want to make sure that you confirm that you got your prize due to you.

1:20:42And so they make you sign this book, this ledger, that has every single Nobel laureate in physics back to the beginning in 1901 with the invention of the x-ray by Wilhelm Röntgen. And so Barry tells me in 2020 that when he won it in 2017, he went there and he's a curious guy and he turns the pages in the book and he sees, oh my God, there's Feynman. Oh my God, there's Madame Curie. Oh my God, there's Einstein. And he said that he saw Einstein's signature. He said, I don't deserve to be in the same book as him, let alone, you know, be in the same mention as him. And I said, Barry, I've got good news and good news for you.

1:21:23First of all, Einstein had the imposter syndrome. And he's like, what are you talking about? He's like, Einstein, I told him Einstein wrote that Isaac Newton contributed more to civilization than even he did to science. And his contributions to science will never be matched again. And I said, but that's not all of Ari, because Isaac Newton had the imposter syndrome. And now he's like, oh, you've got to be kidding. And then he said, I told him, no, actually. Isaac Newton felt that he utterly failed to live up to the standard set by his hero, Jesus Christ. Okay. In fact, he reputedly died a virgin in order to emulate.

1:22:00The only way he could emulate, you know, couldn't turn loaves into fishes and water into wine, but he could die a virgin. And in fact, he did. but some say that was because it was personality. Like the first incel. That's right. So it's changed me, I think, to not venerate the prize as much. I do think it's type of idol. So one of the things I like about your book is that you look forward to the next generations and you imagine that young people are reading it and thinking about their careers. And so what is the takeaway for young readers? You have to give them one piece of advice to aspiring scientists or you're talking to your graduate students or prospective grad students, what do you advise them about how to chart a path through a changing field, you know, which is different from the field that we grew up in and will be different in 20 years?

1:22:47What is your advice to the next generation? That's exactly right. So for me, it all comes down to conservation laws. In this case, conservation of energy. You know, energy, time, whatever you want to say. And it's very hard to. But if you concentrate and you conserve, it's a form of focus, right? I mean, you take a magnifying glass, you take a light, You can concentrate the sunlight and burn up those little worms. No, no, I'm just kidding. I never do that out there, PETA. But you can melt an army man, right? You ever did that? Yeah, sure. That's all I used to do. But you can't just hold them up in the sun, right?

1:23:21So you have to concentrate. You have to focus. You have to conserve it and narrow it down. So for me, it's prioritization. What is the most important thing on your plate? Like, do the hardest tasks that are most necessary. You know, there's this Eisenhower matrix framework and important, urgent, you know, and whatever different spectrum of tasks. And, you know, for me, it's like the most important thing I think a young person can do is to say no. Because the better you are, you know, there's a saying in the business world, like, if you want something done right, ask someone who's too busy to do it.

1:23:56Because they're the ones that are, and you know this, there's like only a handful of people on an experiment that really do, you know, 90 % of the work. work. There might be 10 % that do 90 % work. And those people, they're so oversubscribed that their energy is so drained, they're so distracted, and they're so, you know, kind of torn by their eagerness to please that they don't set boundaries. And so I really do tell my students to concentrate, conserve, focus, whatever you want to say, on energy and do that by having appropriate boundaries in time and in space. All right. Well, thanks very much.

1:24:33The book is called Into the Impossible, Volume 2, Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner. Thanks very much for coming and telling us about all the wisdom you've gleaned from all of these successful stories. Thank you, Daniel. I want to get back to your audience, too, because I love the audience. And your audience is kind of the key demographic. So for people that do get a copy of this book, if you're in academia, I love to give out these meteorites. I think I've given them to Daniel. I have one here on my shelf. Give them to your kids. So to get one, if you're in academia, like my ideal target demographic, just go to briankeating.com slash edu and sign up for my mailing list, which I send out every Monday with some cool stuff, including appearances like this and thoughts on academia and life as a scientist, et cetera.

1:25:18So briankeating.com slash edu with your edu email address. And if you live in the USA, you will get one of these beauties that was delivered by Gravity, not the U.S. Postal Service. I will deliver it to you. Amazing. And you can also catch Brian on his podcast, Into the Impossible. All right. Thanks very much, Brian. Thanks, Daniel.

1:25:44Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you. We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows, If you contact us, we will get back to you. We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D &K Universe. Don't be shy. Write to us. What if the basics you buy every week could help save lives?

1:26:26That's Good Store. Good Store makes high-quality, everyday essentials like coffee, soap, socks, and more, then gives 100 % of profits to charity. Not some, not most, all of it. Every purchase has a real-world impact, like helping with coral reef restoration, providing life-saving care to mothers and babies, and testing and treating tuberculosis in the areas that need it most. Visit us online at good.store. That's G-O-O-D dot S-T-O-R-E. Next time you stock up on essentials, do some good with Good Store. Shop now at good.store. Good Store. Buy what you need. Fund what matters.

1:27:26people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Kreisel, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song. Well, I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia, AAO Rewatch, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y 'all? It's your girl, Sam Jay. And we're the hosts of Everyone Watches Women's Sports, a new podcast from Together and iHeart Women's Sports.

1:28:03We're breaking down the biggest headlines. Naomi Osaka showing out. Shout-outs to you, Naomi. The viral moments. I've been obsessed with Kershawn Rock's boxing journey. She looks good. Her combos are swift. And the stories everyone's talking about across women's sports. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to Everyone Watches Women's Sports on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. Every week, the news gets worse, the world gets crazier, and Yamanika is here to tell whoever's responsible, you're the problem.

1:28:34Do you know I just found out who Sidney Sweeney was? If he got a bunch of women, then I should have a bunch of men. Do better or do less so I don't have to do so much. I'm Yamanika, and I'm out. Listen to You're the Problem with Yamanika on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.