The Universe Didn’t Come From Nothing | The Peter McCormack Show

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Brian Keating** (0:15)
We understand space, we understand matter, we understand energy, we don't understand why time works the way it does. Actually, the reason is because there is no time. Time doesn't exist. The essence of my research is to ask that question, what happened on the Sunday before the Big Bang? Something can't truly come from nothing. We're the only creatures that know we're going to die. That means we're the only creatures that know how precious life is.

**Peter McCormack** (0:37)
We're really wasting an opportunity now to just improve humanity. It feels a little bit civilizational.

**Brian Keating** (0:44)
We have to stop apologizing for humanity's greatness. AI is a tool, it is not a human. Its job is to serve humanity. The computer doesn't know what it means to be human. It not only knows what humans have already done.

**Peter McCormack** (0:55)
If our lives had a forward button, we'd all be dead.

**Brian Keating** (0:58)
It's not time that's limited. It's attention.

**Peter McCormack** (1:08)
All right, Brian, good to see you, man.

**Brian Keating** (1:10)
Peter, thanks for making the short jaunt across the pond, as they say. Actually, two ponds.

**Peter McCormack** (1:14)
Two ponds, yeah. Happy to do it. I was originally so excited to talk to you because I look up at the sky and I wonder how we're here and why we're here.
I was all prepared to come to you and ask you about my biggest questions about the universe and how it works. Then I watched your show with Sean Ryan, and I was like, and I then listened to Sean with Tucker and I was like, this has hit me at a time where I'm thinking about life and whatever, and I saw you're quite introspective. So what I really think, I think where I wanted to ask you first is like, obviously you built a career looking up at the sky and wondering, and now it seems like you're looking internal a lot. What's the connection?

**Brian Keating** (1:56)
I think since I was a kid, I always cared about only the biggest topics. I couldn't get interested in sports or stocks or Bitcoin. I was a late adopter, but thanks to you, I came to it. But the fact for me is, yeah, I do recognize maybe more than most because I study something that's 14 billion years old, but I also constantly recognize how fast time is changing for me right now, with family, with my work, with my research, sometimes with the podcast.
For me, the ultimate goal and the thing that fascinates me the most is time. We understand space, we understand matter, we understand energy, we don't understand why time works the way it does. For example, if I take a pendulum, I don't bring a pendulum, but I have a telescope. Here's a pendulum swinging back and forth like a grandfather clock.
If I turn away for one second and you look back at it, you can't tell the way it started. Did you remember where I started it? Did I start like this? Did I start like this? You don't remember. But the fact is, the laws of nature are invariant. They don't care about which direction you started it, which direction you're looking at it from. They're invariant, they're constant. That means the laws of this pendulum don't care about time. They can't tell time. Yes, you use it in a grandfather clock, that's a separate thing. There's a ratchet, there's a mechanism, whatever, I don't want to get into that. But the actual laws of physics are invariant. They don't care about time, so do for a bowling ball, so too for an electron going around an atom. They don't recognize why time has an arrow. We don't understand that and yet we talk about the Higgs boson, or we'll talk about extra dimensions, or we'll talk about the Big Bang, but we don't understand time. It's embarrassing to me.
I look for the embarrassment. I look for what do we claim that we understand beyond the level that we actually do? I like to poke and prod and annoy my colleagues by saying, we don't really know what we claim to know, and I think a lot of times we're selling people on a bill of goods, that these extra dimensions and all these fantastical things, maybe even intelligent aliens, it's pretty much founded on a foundation that's relatively weak, and I'm just hoping the public doesn't find out about it. My job is to expose it to them. I'm an experimental scientist. Let me first step back. I'm an experimental physicist. I'm not a theorist, Brian Greene, Greg Weinstein, Michio Kaku. I don't talk about airy, fairy things, multiple dimensions and curled up things like that, but I do talk about what can we actually measure? What can we interrogate about Mother Nature or God, if you like?