Brian Keating: I’m Spending $200 Million To Explore Why We Exist! How God Fits Into Science Finally Explained, Is God Real?

Brian Keating (0:00)

This is the shrapnel of an exploded star, and this is a meteorite student from over 4 billion years ago. And this is what Elon will kill for.

Steven Bartlett (0:10)

Wow.

Brian Keating (0:10)

And all of this is to understand that fundamental question. People want to know, how did we get here?

Steven Bartlett (0:15)

And how does the question of God tie into all of this?

Brian Keating (0:18)

Well, for the first time in history, we might be able to answer that question with scientific hard data.

SPEAKER_3 (0:23)

Brian Keating is an astrophysicist and professor whose groundbreaking research and digestible explanations uncover everything we want to know about the universe and what lies beyond.

Brian Keating (0:32)

We go way back. 400 years ago, a genius named Galileo looked through a telescope and he realized that we are not the center of the universe. And now we know the universe is vaster than you or I can comprehend.

Steven Bartlett (0:43)

How big would Earth be on this table? Small. Not even a grain of sand?

Brian Keating (0:47)

Even our galaxy wouldn't be a grain of sand. But we still don't know how the universe began. And so one experiment took me to the South Pole, to the bottom of the planet. And we thought we discovered the creation of time and space itself. It took me to the brink of a Nobel Prize. We were on the front page of every newspaper. But it turned out we didn't see that at all. What we saw was... And we were crushed.

I don't want to get too emotional, but... We had to retract these discoveries. And it was the most crushing experience a scientist can have. But you cannot stop doing experiments, answer these questions.

Steven Bartlett (1:21)

Now you've launched this $200 million project.

Brian Keating (1:23)

Yeah. And the data that this experiment is seeing is exquisite. Because now we know 100% that...

Steven Bartlett (1:36)

Dr. Brian Keating, what is the mission that you're on?

Brian Keating (1:42)

I think I'm the luckiest man on earth. I get to get paid, not that much, but I get to get paid to study the questions that I was most interested in as a 12-year-old pimple-faced kid in upstate New York, which is how did we get here? And I think it's the question that people just want to know. It's the only question you can't know, right? What happened before you were born? You have to rely on other people's word for it, right?

You have to ask questions and be curious. And what is the only event that ever happened for which there was nobody around to ask? And that's the origin of our universe. And the universe contains everything. It contains life, minds, consciousness, everything down to podcasters and daily life.

Steven Bartlett (2:28)

What are some of the most controversial existential questions that you seek to answer with all the research that you do?

Brian Keating (2:35)

So, you've talked about this before on the show. The question of finite versus infinite games. And what we do in science, science is an infinite game, right? You can't win science. But along the way, there's many, many finite games. In other words, fixed competitions for which there's only one victor, right? I got offered a professorship at UC San Diego. That means 399 other people didn't get that job. I got tenure. A lot of people don't get tenure. I got this, I got that. And then eventually, I didn't get, you know, spoiler alert, my first book's called Losing The Nobel Prize. But there's only, you know, at most, three people that can win a Nobel Prize every year. In my field, the infinite game is comprised of many, many finite games. And the most important questions that generate the most controversy, the most heat, the most passion have to do with the nature of the origin of our universe. It's actually not a settled science.

It's not actually known for a fact whether our universe came once, existed in a certain way eternally, in a way I can describe, went through cycles of creation and destruction, and or it follows sort of a biblical creation narrative. These are all kind of open questions in a certain sense. And because they're not yet resolved, and because the only way to resolve them is through data, we cannot actually answer these. So the human mind is in a hybrid, it's in a superposition. We kind of have a lot of knowledge, but we have a lot of questions. We have a lot of solutions, but we don't have a lot of answers. We're trying to understand that fundamental question. And I always say, I want to know what happened on the Tuesday before the Big Bang. Imagine this, a day before which there was no yesterday. You couldn't even speak about it if you were there. Obviously nobody was there to witness it. But even conceptually speaking, how does time progress if time starts, right? We think about time, and time is very mercurial. It's very hard to describe, define what time is. Is time what a watch measures? Is time how my hair gets gray over the years? Is time how we perceive it, sitting on a hot stove versus being with a pretty girlfriend? Are those methods unequal? Are they equally valid?