How are scientific discoveries made?

Daniel and Kelly explore how scientific discoveries are made, digging into fun stories, the history of science with Prof. Lydia Patton and the lessons of Nobel Prize winners with Prof. Brian Keating.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Hollywood tells us what it's like to make a scientific discovery. Okay,
set the scene. A lone scientist wearing a lab coat
because they're always wearing a lab coat for some reason,
has a flash of inspiration, sometimes during a musical montage,
and that's when the ideas come together. He and it's
almost always a he rushes out to tell the world

(00:27):
and everyone greets the news with enthusiasm. That's a fun
bit of storytelling. But what is it really like? Does
that scenario ever happen? Or are scientists working slowly for
decades pushing the fuzzy bits of the puzzle together until
people are finally convinced. And yes, I have to admit
that wouldn't make quite as good of a movie. But anyway,

(00:49):
today we're going to pull back the curtain on the
process of scientific discovery and tell you stories of dramatic
as well as frustratingly slow discoveries. You'll hear the actual
historical audio of scientists being shocked at a discovery that
they were making in real time, a conversation with a
historian of science, and an interview with a man who

(01:10):
has spoken to more Nobel prize winners than maybe anyone
else on the planet, and we'll try to learn what
led to moments of understanding and discovery. Welcome to Daniel
and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. Hello. I'm Kelly winder Smith. I

(01:37):
study parasites and space, and today we're going to talk
about how many times I have not discovered things.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
Hello.

Speaker 3 (01:45):
I'm Daniel Whitson. I'm a particle physicist, and I got
into particle physics to reveal the fundamental nature of the
universe and make earth shattering discoveries. But in thirty years
I've made exactly zero.

Speaker 1 (01:58):
You've made exactly zero. Okay, Well that's a nice lead
into the question I have for you today. So you know,
at least in my field, and I assume this is
the same in your field. Before you start an experiment,
you have a prediction, you have an expectation for how
the results are going to go, and then you design
your experiment well so that if you're wrong, you can
be sure that you're wrong. That's a good experiment. So
what percent of the time roughly does the work that

(02:21):
you do match the predictions that you made initially?

Speaker 3 (02:25):
Wow, way to put your finger on a source bot, Kelly,
So far every single experiment. We've done matches our expectations,
and we've even analyzed the statistics of that, Like you
don't expect when you flip a coin to get exactly
fifty percent heads and tails on a fair coin. You
expect some fluctuations, and we see exactly those kinds of fluctuations.

(02:46):
Sometimes the data is a little bit weird, rarely it's
very weird, and almost never is it super duper weird.
So we have a beautiful Gaussian curve of all of
our weirdness and really no surprises so far.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
So every paper you've done, the prediction you were testing,
you found exactly what you expected.

Speaker 3 (03:05):
I mean, I work in a field where if we
find something unexpected, it's a Nobel prize. Right. If you
find a new particle, if you find a new force,
that's a huge revelation. So we are constantly searching for stuff.
No we didn't find dark matter, No we didn't find this,
No we didn't find that. Ninety nine point ninety nine
percent of our papers are negative results. We looked for

(03:27):
X and we didn't see it. The standard model wins again.

Speaker 1 (03:31):
Well, congratulations for being right on thousands of papers, Like
you told us the other day you have thousands of publications.

Speaker 3 (03:39):
No, no, it's a great disappointment. I wish that we
were wrong. I got into this field to prove the
standard model wrong, to find situations where we see something
we don't expect, and not just to discover something new. Right,
some theorists could come up with a model of supersymmetry
and predict the selectron or whatever, and we could go
off and see that. That's sort of what happened with
the Higgs boson and with the top quark twenty years earlier.

(04:01):
But it's been a long time since we had a surprise,
a moment when the data told us something about the
universe we weren't expecting.

Speaker 1 (04:08):
Well, Daniel, I'm excited that I can say to you
that I wish you failure.

Speaker 3 (04:12):
There you go exactly. What about you? How about your
great moments of discovery where they unexpected or expected.

Speaker 1 (04:19):
I think I'm at like fifty to fifty on my
predictions panning out, like I mean, so it's it's not
a like coin flip. I actually, you know, I do
serious literature searches, but you know, when you study animal behaviors,
so often it's like, oh, you know, we know that
the neurotransmitters are doing this, so we should predict that
the animal will do this, and then they don't do
what you expected. And that's pretty typical as we sort

(04:42):
of muddle through neuroscience and whatnot.

Speaker 3 (04:45):
Well, when that happens, when they don't do what you expect,
have you learned something about the animal, something fundamental that
is scientific, or have you learned oops, I made a mistake,
or I don't know how to do neuroscience or something.

Speaker 1 (04:56):
No, we always learn something like I do. I spend
a lot of time. I'm carefully designing my experiments so
that even if the answer is things didn't go the
way you thought they would, there's still something interesting to.

Speaker 3 (05:08):
Say, Well, that's a well designed experiment. Congratulations, Oh thanks,
we published No matter what.

Speaker 1 (05:14):
That's right. Well, I've gotten very comfortable with this form
of failure, and.

Speaker 3 (05:19):
The success and failure of scientists is part of our
topic today. We are doing a deep dive into the
nature of the scientific process, pulling back the curtain on
how science actually works. What scientists do all day. We
don't just take naps and wake up with great moments
of inspiration, though I guess that does happen for some
of us. We work slowly and carefully through the process

(05:41):
of science, figuring out how the universe works and convincing
our peers of what we have learned. We have an
episode later this week on the scientific review process, but
today we're digging into the juiciest bit how scientific discoveries
actually happen.

Speaker 1 (05:54):
And we are super lucky to have a bunch of
different input for this particular episode. We're going to start
with Daniel walking us through what discovery tends to look
like in physics. Then we're going to bring an expert
on to talk to us about the history of scientific discoveries,
and finally we're talking to someone who interviewed a bunch
of Nobel Prize winners and asked them about their discoveries

(06:16):
and how that went along. So Daniel on this path
of discovery. Maybe this should be a self help podcast
now it feels self healthy right now.

Speaker 3 (06:27):
But how to win a Nobel Prize Steps one through ten.
You'll be shocked at step seven.

Speaker 1 (06:31):
Well, let's start with your first discovery that you want
to tell us about today.

Speaker 3 (06:35):
Yeah, I think it's important to walk through some examples
of discoveries because I think that the picture people have
in their minds of how scientific discovery happens is shaped
by a lot of these stories, most of which are
apocryphal and give people sort of a cartoonish view of
the process. And I want to get into the nitty gritty.

Speaker 1 (06:53):
So I have to make a confession here, which is
that for a long time I didn't realize that apocryphal
means a story that isn't true. Oh no, So I'd
just like to clear that up for anyone who is
comparably bad at the English language.

Speaker 3 (07:09):
These are great dinner party stories or popsy clickbait, but
they're not always real. And maybe one of the most
famous moments of discovery is Newton and the Apple. As
the story goes, Newton is sitting in his garden. He
sees an apple fall down, and he thinks about it
deep and he goes, hmmm, why do apples fall down
towards the center of the earth? And he comes up

(07:30):
with this theory of gravity. Is that the story you've heard, Kelly?

Speaker 1 (07:33):
Absolutely?

Speaker 3 (07:35):
And does that story make sense to you? Like, how
does looking at an apple tell anybody how gravity works?

Speaker 1 (07:42):
I mean, I guess I didn't imagine that he looked
at the apple and immediately knew how gravity works. I
imagined that he saw the apple fall and thought to himself,
why did it go down and not up? And that
got him sort of thinking about the question more deeply.

Speaker 3 (07:56):
Well, you know, that's a question that Aristotle worked on
thousands of years earlier, like why do things fall down?
It was a deep question, and you know, his answer
was like, well, there's some things it's in their nature
to fall down, and an apple and rocks and earth
are made of the falling down kind of stuff. And
that's not really an answer, you know, but this definitely
has been a question for a long long time. And

(08:18):
so it doesn't even really make sense to me, because
like seeing the apple inspires the question, but the question
is an ancient and outstanding one. Anyway, this whole story
doesn't make any sense because it's all made up. It
didn't really happen that way at all. The real story
is that Newton took years, decades to develop his theory
of gravity. He was writing letters back and forth with

(08:40):
another scientist, Hook for years, and he was thinking about gravity,
and he was wondering if you could come up with
a theory of gravity to explain why apples fall down,
and also why the moon doesn't fall down? Right, like
why is the moon in orbit around the Earth? This
kind of stuff, And so he was trying to develop that,
and he was trying to make it mathematical. He didn't

(09:00):
want just a story like Aristotle provided. He wanted a theory,
something that would let you calculate the force between two objects,
for example. And so it took him two decades to
put this theory together. And the you know, the fundamental
idea he came up with is that gravity gets weaker
with distance. And he showed that if you framed it
in this one over are squared or are as the

(09:21):
distance between objects, the force drops with a distance squared,
that you could actually calculate not just that an apple
should fall, but also that the moon should be in
its orbit. And he was able to reproduce the motion
of the moon. And this is the great triumph to
have a single theory of gravity that describes not just
what's happening on Earth, but also in the heavens.

Speaker 1 (09:41):
All right, Well, so first I'm wondering with the Aristotle
and the birds. Did he think that the that birds
were like made of uppy stuff sometimes and downy stuff others,
and like what did this transmogrification look like? But let's
not get too far off topic.

Speaker 3 (09:55):
I would love to have Aristotle on the podcast him
some of these questions, you know, also questions like why
didn't you ever do an experiment to try out some
of your ideas? Like in ten minutes, Galileo disproved a
lot of Aristontal's ideas just by doing experiments.

Speaker 4 (10:10):
Well.

Speaker 1 (10:10):
I was looking at the New York Times Bestseller's paperback
list the other day, and a book that beat mine
is one where a medium is giving you advice from
the dead. So maybe we can there's some people we
can reach out to you to make that happen.

Speaker 3 (10:23):
But that's nonfiction.

Speaker 1 (10:24):
That's in the nonfiction. Yeah, I know, so anyway, but
and it beat me fai But anyway.

Speaker 3 (10:30):
So, but you guys are on the nonfiction bestseller list.

Speaker 4 (10:33):
How we are.

Speaker 3 (10:34):
Congrats?

Speaker 1 (10:35):
Thanks, it'll be it. It won't be top secret by
the time the episode comes out, but we're on eleven.
And Ada will point out that we didn't break the
top ten, which is what she does every time I
mentioned that we're on the New York Times bestsellers list.

Speaker 3 (10:47):
Oh my god, that's huge. Wow, wonderful.

Speaker 5 (10:50):
Thanks.

Speaker 1 (10:51):
Anyway, would be nice if I was above the medium person,
but I'm not.

Speaker 3 (10:53):
But anyway, okay, So well, that gives you a very
nice cocktail story to tell when next time you go
to a fancy party. And this is what happened with Newton. Oh,
Newton developed his theory of gravity, and then he told
this story at like parties where it's like I saw
the apple and I had a moment of inspiration. And
so this is Newton basically writing clickbait. And then the
story got around and Voltaire heard about it. He's a

(11:17):
famous writer, and he wrote about it, and that's what
popularized it. And so Newton sort of like wrote a
pr pitch about his moment of inspiration that didn't really happen,
and then it got propagated by the mainstream media, which
was Voltaire at the time.

Speaker 1 (11:31):
Amazing, How do we know that this didn't really happen
to Newton if he said it did?

Speaker 3 (11:35):
Well, we have records of Newton's work, right, Like the
dude kept logbooks and we have his letters, and we
see him struggling with these concepts together with Hook over years.
And then it was twenty years later that his theory
was fully developed. So we see the development of it
in his notes and in his letters.

Speaker 1 (11:51):
Huh, all right, fantastic. I didn't expect Voltaire to come
into our episode today, but there he is.

Speaker 3 (11:56):
Yeah. Well, that's because this is the best of all
possible podcasts.

Speaker 1 (11:59):
Oh my god, us you're so right, you're so right.
All right. So while people are discovering that this is
the best podcast ever, let's move on to another amazing
bombshell of a discovery about radioactivity.

Speaker 3 (12:10):
So here's a moment of discovery that really is sort
of like the cartoon. There's an accident which leads to
a moment of inspiration and then like very rapidly, publication
and awards.

Speaker 1 (12:21):
Just real quick to say, you usually don't want the
words accident and radioactivity in the same sentence. So I'm
hoping this accidental discovery didn't end anyone's life.

Speaker 3 (12:30):
Pretty sure everybody involved in early radiation discovery's got cancer.
Oh sometimes several times.

Speaker 1 (12:36):
All right, you're the downer today.

Speaker 3 (12:37):
All right, speaking of X rays and cancer, some listener
wrote in recently and told me that until fairly recently,
you could go to a shoe store and get a
very intense X ray of your foot to make sure
your shoe is sized correctly.

Speaker 1 (12:53):
Huh yeah, do not recommend.

Speaker 3 (12:56):
Do not recommend, absolutely not. Anyway, Becherel is credited with
the discovery of radioactivity, specifically in uranium, and this comes
quick on the heels of Runken's discovery of X rays,
which was also an accident. We can dig into that
another time. But X rays with a new thing. Everybody
was excited about X rays and becherrel knew that uranium,

(13:17):
if you left it near photographic plates, would leave an
imprint on the plate. So, for example, uranium crystal and
you put it on top of the plate, that it
would leave the shape of the crystal onto the plate.
And he was wondering how this worked, and he actually
had the totally wrong theory. He thought that uranium was
absorbing sunlight and emitting X rays because X rays with
this new exciting thing, and so he thought, maybe that's

(13:40):
what's happening, and so he wanted to do this experiment
where he wrapped photographic plates in paper so that visible
light didn't hit them, and then he would put a
block of uranium on top of that, and they put
the whole thing out in the sunlight. And the idea
was the uranium would absorb sunlight amid X rays which
would go through the paper and leave an imprint on
the plate. That was his big experiment. Okay, but it

(14:01):
was cloudy in Paris, right, Paris did not cooperate with
his plans. His experiment needed sunlight, so he put the
whole thing in a drawer over the weekend, and he
came back after the weekend and he decided to develop
the photographic plate, even though he hadn't put it out
in the sunlight. And what he saw was a perfect
picture of the uranium crystal, even though there hadn't been
any sunlight. And that's when he realized, Oh, the uranium

(14:23):
is actually just generating radiation on its own. It doesn't
require sunlight, and it wasn't X rays, and so this
is like his moment of discovery. He realized, Wow, this
uranium is generating something on its own. He reported it
the very next day to like the Academic Society and
then won the Nobel Prize for it.

Speaker 1 (14:41):
WHOA, I wonder why he decided to develop the photographic
plate anyway, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (14:46):
People asked him this and he was just like, I
don't know on a hunch. I just was wondering, you know,
just like curiosity.

Speaker 1 (14:53):
Wow. Yeah, that is amazingly lucky.

Speaker 3 (14:55):
It's very lucky. Yeah, absolutely, And he's also very lucky
because it turns out that somebody else did the same
thing forty years earlier and wrote it up and reported
it and was just totally ignored.

Speaker 1 (15:05):
Oh no, And did Becquerel cite this other guy.

Speaker 3 (15:09):
No, it was just like lost in the literature. You know,
how you've done something and then you think it's clever,
and then you discovered that some Soviet dude did it
in nineteen seventy eight much better than you did.

Speaker 1 (15:19):
Happens to me all the time.

Speaker 3 (15:20):
That's because we have good literature searches and they didn't
at that time. And so yeah, but this was really
a moment write an accident. Very quickly becherel realized what
it meant, and it changed our understanding of the whole
microscopic world. And this led to Curi's experiments and the
foundation of quantum mechanics.

Speaker 4 (15:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:38):
So I always thought that Kuri discovered radioactivity. Can you
quickly tell us what it was that she discovered in particular?

Speaker 3 (15:43):
Right? So, Curi discovered two new radioactive elements. Right, Becquerel
discovered radioactivity from uranium salts. Curi discovered polonium and radium.
She actually coined the term radioactivity. And Curi's real insight
is that radioactivity is an atomic property, not chemical one.
It's not like you got atoms bumping together and emitting

(16:04):
something due to some reaction. It's something inside the atom
that's happening.

Speaker 1 (16:08):
Okay, awesome. So next I see that we're talking about
the m M experiment, which makes me think about eminem's
and now I'm hungry. Is this experiment delicious?

Speaker 3 (16:18):
Yes, this is the experiment to discover whether different colors
of eminems actually have different flavors and.

Speaker 1 (16:22):
Why they melt in your mouth but not in your hand,
which side note absolutely.

Speaker 3 (16:28):
No, No, this is the Michael Sinmoreley experiment, the famous
experiment that taught us that light travels the same speed
for all observers and disproved the existence of the ether.

Speaker 4 (16:39):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (16:40):
That's important.

Speaker 3 (16:40):
It's important, and it's often told as this groundbreaking experiment
which pivoted our understanding of the universe. And it's true
that this was an unexpected result and it proves something
really important about the universe. But contrary to the popular lore,
it's not something that was widely understood or appreciated at
the time. It's a little bit revisionist history to go

(17:02):
back and say, oh, yeah, this experiment happened, and then
everybody changed their mind.

Speaker 1 (17:06):
Oh so this experiment happened. Nobody changed their mind because
they ignored it, just like the last guy who discovered radioactivity,
whose name I think we managed to not even say.

Speaker 6 (17:14):
So.

Speaker 1 (17:14):
Take that guy who did it first.

Speaker 3 (17:17):
That was Abel, the Saint Victor, who discovered radioactivity forty
years before Becquerel, but was ignored by the Nobel Committee.

Speaker 1 (17:24):
But we've just said it straight.

Speaker 3 (17:26):
Yeah, and that's not exactly what happened here. People were
aware of this experiment. They just really struggled to digest
this bizarre concept that like could travel without a medium.
And so let's go back to eighteen eighty seven when
this experiment happened. Back then, we had interference experiments and
diffraction studies. We had all this data showing that light

(17:46):
was a wave, and Maxwell had his equations that described
light as ripples in electromagnetism. But they were wondering, like,
what is it a ripple in you know like sound
is a ripple in air, and water waves are obviously
ripples in water. But what is light propagating through you?
This velocity that we see should be relative to some

(18:07):
medium if light is the same kind of thing as
everything else we've studied. And so Michael Sen Morley did
this experiment to try to detect that medium. They said, well,
if light is moving through some medium, let's call it
the ether, and it fills the universe, the Earth is
also moving through it because the Earth goes around the Sun.
And so as the Earth goes around the Sun, we
should see different velocities of the speed of light because

(18:28):
we have a different velocity relative to the ether. And
so they did this cool experiment with interferometers where they
had a light beam and they split it and it
went into perpendicular directions and then came back. And they
were very sensitive to small differences because of their cool
optics and interferometry, and they expected when they did the
experiment in spring and in summer and in fall and

(18:49):
in winter, they would get different results and they could
measure our velocity through the ether. But what they found
was no difference. That there was never any difference in
how long it took light to go go one direction
or the other, and this was totally insensitive to the
time of year, and they it was really an amazing experiment,
like the detail they put in it to make this
thing super sensitive, and so they found nothing, and that

(19:12):
was very confusing. Like obviously now in hindsight, the conclusion
is there is no ether, and light moves to the
same velocity regardless of the observer, and it's a propagation
of electromagnetic waves through space itself. We know that now,
but it's not fair to say, like we thought there
was an ether. We had Michael Simmore the experiment. The
next day it was like, yeah, let's move on. Obviously
there's no ether. Instead, people clung to the ether hypothesis

(19:35):
for a long time. They thought, maybe there's a blob
of ether and the Earth is dragging it along with it,
so we can't detect our velocity relative to the ether
because we're like in a little pocket of ether. And
we had to do all sorts of other studies to
disprove that by looking at like the angles of stars
and how they changed through the year. And so it

(19:56):
wasn't widely accepted until after Einstein's theory of relative nineteen
oh five, So this is twenty years later. Einstein comes
up with this theoretical explanation for this experiment, which brings
it all together and finally makes it all make sense.
And it wasn't until then that everybody's like, Okay, yeah,
I can put this together and this is the way
the universe works. Really, the physics establishment was like, well,

(20:18):
that was a strange experiment. We don't understand it. Let's
put it in the HM category until we figure it out.

Speaker 1 (20:23):
Well, one, I think it's nice that they at least
paid attention to it, even if they put it in
the HUM category. It was red, so that's good. But
did Eminem survive until nineteen oh five to see the
work validated? Oh, good question, because it would have been
a delicious moment to know that you were right.

Speaker 3 (20:40):
Yes, both of them lived on for decades longer, so
they definitely saw the theory of relativity become widely accepted.

Speaker 7 (20:46):
Ah.

Speaker 1 (20:46):
I love hearing that scientists get validation within their lifetime.
That's a good feeling. All right, let's take a break
and we'll talk about another discovery before bringing on our
other experts. All right, So in our last experiment, our

(21:20):
scientists were deliciously validated. Who is the next scientist we're
going to talk about?

Speaker 3 (21:24):
So we're going to talk about another famous discovery, that
of pulsars by Joscelyn 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.

(21:45):
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 pole. And these things
are called quasars, are super duper bright and for a
long time not really understood because nobody could understand where

(22:07):
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.

(22:28):
So she built this huge radio telescope. And a radio
telescope is not like a telescope you looked through with
your eyeball. It's more like a huge antenna. And she
rolled out one hundred and twenty 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.

Speaker 1 (22:48):
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.

Speaker 3 (23:01):
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 in your laptop, the data comes in, you're analyzing
it with some cool visuals. She had a printer which
produced one hundred feet of paper per day with the
data on it, and she like visually analyzed it and

(23:22):
looked for stuff like this.

Speaker 7 (23:24):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (23:24):
And on November twenty eighth, nineteen sixty seven, 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

(23:46):
from like satellites or from radios or other artificial sources.
And so at first she nicknamed it in her notes
LGM one for Little Green Men. She was like, am
I getting signals from aliens? Here have I received the
first interstellar transmission.

Speaker 1 (24:03):
It's interesting that the Little Green Men troope was around
that early. I guess I hadn't realized that we've been
imagining aliens as little green news for that long.

Speaker 3 (24:12):
I think it comes from the history of like badly
informed fiction about life on Mars, doesn't it.

Speaker 1 (24:17):
Oh, I don't know, Yeah, there's an episode we should do.

Speaker 3 (24:20):
And so she was wondering, like, well, what are the
possible explanations for this other than alien's right, And so
they went through all sorts of cross checks to try
to understand what this is. So this is not like
Becquarel where she discovers this. She understands immediately what it is,
she goes and publishes it and then wins the Nobel Prize.
Now instead, she spent months thinking about ways she could

(24:42):
be fooling herself, Like, could this be signals reflected off
the moon? Right? Could this just be something from an
orbiting satellite. Could 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.

Speaker 1 (24:59):
Science, right, yeah, good for her.

Speaker 3 (25:00):
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. And then it turns out
it was just a tea kettle.

Speaker 1 (25:09):
In the lounge, right, yeah, yeah, that would be embarrassing.

Speaker 3 (25:12):
But finally it was confirmed with another radio telescope, so
she knew it wasn't instrumentation. But this took months. 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

(25:34):
the radio. So really an amazing and very important discovery
for which her advisor won the Nobel Prize. And she
didn't know.

Speaker 1 (25:41):
That's what I was gonna guess. Is one of those
stories where the woman's advisor gets the credit. Ah cud.

Speaker 3 (25:48):
Yeah, And she is so classy. She came to UCI
and talked about this, and she is very classy and
not bitter at all.

Speaker 1 (25:55):
That's for her.

Speaker 3 (25:56):
Anyway. It's a good story.

Speaker 1 (25:57):
Well, it's an awful story, but a good Yeah, she
did great.

Speaker 3 (26:02):
She's handled it very well. Yeah, okay, exactly, 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. But it does happen, and very
soon after the discovery of the pulsars, there was exactly

(26:24):
this kind of discovery. And while these folks were making
their discovery, they accidentally left a tape recorder on what
so we have audio you're gonna hear of folks making
a mind blowing discovery in real time.

Speaker 1 (26:37):
Oh that's awesome.

Speaker 3 (26:38):
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.
They didn't like know how to operate a telescope or
do data analysis. They were like, well, this is possible.

(27:01):
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 kit Peek near Tucson, which is a
gorgeous place and anyone in Arizona should go up to
kit 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 tics into frequency, and so they were

(27:22):
looking for a pulse on their a silloscope, looking for
like a little peak on their selescope. And 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

(27:42):
looking in the wrong place. But they didn't have any
more time. Oh no, 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, and you know, they're just like
getting started. They just plug it in, turn it on. Okay,
let's get going. They didn't really expect to see something.

(28:04):
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.

Speaker 4 (28:12):
This next observation will be observation number eighteen. You've got
a bleeding pulse here. Hey, wow, you don't suppose that's
really working.

Speaker 8 (28:27):
You can do sure bang in the middle of the periods,
but don't mean right bang the middle of scale.

Speaker 7 (28:34):
I really looks something from the oven.

Speaker 3 (28:36):
M it was growing too.

Speaker 5 (28:40):
Let's been out the side of it too.

Speaker 8 (28:41):
Here bottle, isn't it? Yeah, cookies, look a bleeding post.
It's growing, John, it is, Look it is. You're right.

Speaker 1 (28:56):
This is so much fun.

Speaker 3 (28:57):
I love also their mid Atlantic accents. It looks like
a bleeding pulse.

Speaker 1 (29:03):
I'm not sure that's exactly the mid Atlantic accent that
I grew up with in New Jersey, but yes, it's
a fun accent.

Speaker 3 (29:09):
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.
Way we did it.

Speaker 1 (29:17):
We did it.

Speaker 3 (29:18):
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,
and it all worked and boom and they had it.
So sometimes you really do have those amazing moments of discovery.

Speaker 1 (29:31):
Did they also get Nobels?

Speaker 3 (29:33):
No, it helped us understand the crab nebula and it
was a really important result. But their discovery was in
sixty nine, and Bell discovered her first pulsar in sixty eight.
And in seventy four the Nobel Prize in Physics was
not given to any of these folks, only to the
advisor of Bell.

Speaker 1 (29:49):
That is not cool, 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.

Speaker 3 (30:02):
Let's talk to somebody who's 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 and 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

(30:25):
focuses on gravitational wave discoveries. Lydia, thank you very much
for joining us on the podcast.

Speaker 5 (30:31):
Absolutely, it's great to talk to you.

Speaker 3 (30:33):
So we are, too, scientists on this podcast talking about
our experience of discovery and our understanding of it. But
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 want to invite you
on the show and ask you about the concept of
scientific discovery. Most people, I think, have a view of

(30:54):
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? Or does that sort of
clash with the reality of the day to day working

(31:15):
of science. Yeah?

Speaker 6 (31:17):
So, I mean our chimmedies supposedly did happen at least
once that someone did that. But I think there I
think there are moments when everything falls into place. And
the first thing that I think it's really easy to
understand is that those moments are often hard one. So

(31:38):
even the our Communities 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.

Speaker 3 (31:54):
So are you telling me this really happened, like we
actually have documented evidence that this happened.

Speaker 5 (31:59):
Or oh, probably not, that's the no.

Speaker 6 (32:05):
The myth is that he was in his bath tub,
which I you know, who knows whether they even have
bath tubs at the time, right, But and that's 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

(32:25):
that story, which is probably apocryphal, he has to know
what he's looking for.

Speaker 5 (32:30):
In the first place, Like he has to know why.

Speaker 6 (32:33):
Like the average person if they just see something fall
in their bath water, are not going to say, oh,
this is a physics concept. You know, this is something
that 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 the problem, and you had to have
a lot of background to even figure out like, Okay,
this is going to help me with mechanics, This is
going to help me with something with a problem that

(32:54):
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.

Speaker 3 (33:07):
It, and not just training to recognize, but also lots
of failures, right, lots of moments where it didn't all
come together, things you tried that didn't.

Speaker 6 (33:15):
Work, that didn't work out, and things that didn't solve
the problem. And it's like it. I mean, people often
use the example of solving a puzzle. That's not quite it,
but it's the idea, is you even if it is
something as simple as solving a puzzle, and I would
agree that science is more complicated than that. But even

(33:35):
with a puzzle solving metaphor, you have to try and
fail a whole bunch of times.

Speaker 5 (33:41):
Before you start figuring it out.

Speaker 6 (33:42):
Like if you think about when you were a kid
and you tried to do the Rubi's cue, it took
a long time to try to figure it out until
you could reliably do it.

Speaker 5 (33:51):
And it's kind of the same thing.

Speaker 3 (33:52):
Fascinating, and so even this canonical story, this Eureka moment,
is probably a story that's been made up to invey
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?

Speaker 6 (34:12):
That is one of the biggest questions that I think
historians of science wrestle with philosophers of science.

Speaker 5 (34:19):
Maybe a bit less, but philosophers of.

Speaker 6 (34:21):
Science deal with something where we wonder a lot about
why we have a need for truth in science.

Speaker 3 (34:29):
That seems like an obvious question, and it's an.

Speaker 6 (34:31):
Obvious questions, but it's a tough question to answer. Why
do we want to think that science describes reality?

Speaker 5 (34:37):
Right?

Speaker 6 (34:38):
And so this is one of the biggest questions in
contemporary philosophy of science is why what makes us think
that the claims of science or 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

(34:58):
use it to win any our argument, which to any
philosopher is going to be super attractive.

Speaker 5 (35:03):
Right. It's like your sort of trump card.

Speaker 6 (35:06):
You 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.

Speaker 5 (35:18):
Now I just come out on top.

Speaker 6 (35:21):
You know, if I end up in an argument on
social media, like if I just bring this out.

Speaker 5 (35:25):
Everybody will have to agree that I'm right, you know.

Speaker 6 (35:28):
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

(35:52):
able to win any argument, even a political or 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 that oh, okay, now we're on top, we're winning,

(36:17):
and we have this certain, true picture of the way
the world works, which is also extremely attractive.

Speaker 3 (36:23):
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.

Speaker 5 (36:38):
That's the idea. And there have been multiple examples of that.

Speaker 6 (36:41):
One of my favorites is with somebody I've studied some
in my careers, someone named hermon Vun Helmholtz and who's
a German polymath. Really he physicists, 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

(37:02):
and 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

(37:24):
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, you know, was do a whole bunch
of experiments that disproved in his mind the vitalist hypothesis

(37:46):
and his achievement, in conjunction with the achievements of a
bunch of other people in that same vein, basically killed
the vitalist paradigm and.

Speaker 5 (37:56):
It had a huge impact.

Speaker 6 (37:58):
And so what happened was that people have 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 material processes

(38:20):
in the body and so forth. But they didn't have
any absolute proof of it, but they were seeking it,
and 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 that's the

(38:40):
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.

Speaker 3 (38:47):
That's just 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 you or understanding, you know,
tectonic plates in the Michaelson Morley experiment. Why can't we
just let the data speak? Is there some part of
our science which is too subjective, which you know, makes

(39:11):
us skeptical of some discoveries and more accepting of others.
Is there a way we can upgrade our science to
make it less subjective?

Speaker 7 (39:20):
Oh?

Speaker 5 (39:20):
Yeah, that is That is a great and huge question.

Speaker 6 (39:23):
I think why can't we I'll tackle why can't we
just let the data speak? Because to me, that is
that is one of the biggest questions that I look at.
Data does not speak in and of itself.

Speaker 5 (39:35):
That's one.

Speaker 6 (39:36):
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 And there's something to
be said for that. I 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

(39:58):
you have to part of a scientific meth 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

(40:18):
lot of times even very high level scientists will say, look,
you know, we're running this experiment and one of the
most exciting things about it is that we're getting data
that even we don't understand.

Speaker 5 (40:29):
You know, even.

Speaker 6 (40:30):
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 know, 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

(40:51):
lot of experiments, especially in science, that work that way,
where they were what Friedrich Steinley calls exploratory experiments where
people were just trying eyeing out different hypotheses, just testing
out what they might be able to find, and 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 even to even

(41:12):
get the kind of the juice out of it, to
get the real information out of the data.

Speaker 3 (41:16):
Well, so it sounds like you're telling me, and I
apologize for asking you to summarize or simplify an entire
like one hundred year long argument among philosophers, but it
sounds like you're telling me that 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

(41:38):
point of view and the questions you're asking and the
explanations you're interested in accepting.

Speaker 6 (41:43):
Okay, so that's a slight that's a somewhat provocative way
of putting way 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

(42:07):
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?

Speaker 5 (42:27):
We only know what that means.

Speaker 6 (42:30):
We don't have It's not like we have to pick
what we think about it or what we expect or
what we want out of it. It'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

(42:52):
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

(43:15):
us objective results without any effort. I think that's really
where I see attention.

Speaker 3 (43:21):
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 Galleo and
Bacon understood the importance of empiricism and doing experiments. Is
that a cartoonish, simplified version of the development of science.

(43:43):
Can you give us a sort of more nuanced view
of like how we came to develop this engine for discovery.

Speaker 6 (43:50):
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. So

(44:10):
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,

(44:31):
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. We're trying to understand things
from whatever perspective we may have, and the idea of science, however,

(44:54):
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 scientific understanding is very old. But at the same time,

(45:15):
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
eighteen hundreds that those two things started blending in an
institutional context to give us something like the modern idea

(45:36):
that there is a department or a faculty in the
university that is specifically devoted to science. And 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

(45:57):
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 Girta contributing to
plant science Schiller in the nineteenth century. They were cited

(46:18):
often by like major scientists in the German nineteenth century,
and we don't really know what to do with that
because we have a particular idea of the way of
who a scientist is and who gets to be a scientist,
and that person works at a certain type of university

(46:39):
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

(46:59):
doing research for like private corporations.

Speaker 5 (47:02):
They were doing research.

Speaker 6 (47:03):
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, and 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 in it. The current understanding is actually very historically specific,

(47:25):
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.

Speaker 3 (47:36):
And Faraday's examples 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, it.

Speaker 6 (47:44):
Can happen one hundred percent. I mean, this is the
guy who came up with the motor. Basically, I think
that should be an example to anyone.

Speaker 3 (47:54):
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

(48:16):
and evolving, this that developing to learn about the universe.
Do you think that it's likely that other intelligent civilized
races around the galaxy, for example, are doing science. You know,
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

(48:37):
also stumbled on the process of building hypotheses, doing experiments
refining that. Do you think we're likely to find that
in alien species?

Speaker 5 (48:47):
Oh, that's a great question. So I think one of
the things I think.

Speaker 6 (48:51):
About that is that it's closely related to another question,
which is science inevitable in the way that we've developed it.
So on any planet, with any species, or even if
we went back and re ran the tape of our history,
would it all happen the same way? And I think

(49:14):
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.

Speaker 4 (49:34):
Right.

Speaker 5 (49:35):
I'm not sure that's true.

Speaker 3 (49:36):
It seems awfully flattering, right to say that the way
we're doing it has got to be the only way.

Speaker 6 (49:41):
We are very triumphalist about our way of doing science.
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.

Speaker 3 (49:54):
You know.

Speaker 6 (49:55):
The idea is if we could just all get on board,
if everyone could just trust the science and tru 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.

Speaker 5 (50:06):
Like us, why are we supposed to save everybody?

Speaker 7 (50:09):
You know?

Speaker 5 (50:10):
Like, what's wait a minute?

Speaker 6 (50:11):
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 shouldn't be required to do is save the world.
And 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

(50:37):
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 a biologist 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,

(50:57):
and we don't have any way of knowing whether they're
doing that intentionally or for what purpose. But 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.

Speaker 3 (51:19):
What's a good candidate to think.

Speaker 6 (51:21):
Well, one of my colleagues at Virginia Tech, Ashley, she
did her dissertation on New Caledonian crows, that 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.

Speaker 5 (51:35):
If I were better versus in this area, I would
have lots more examples.

Speaker 3 (51:38):
But just having many examples on Earth make an argument
that it's more likely to exist on other planets as well,
like other environments.

Speaker 6 (51:46):
I would like for that to be true, because, as
you say, maybe you didn't intend to say this, but
it's his interpretation.

Speaker 5 (51:53):
It kind of throws a mirror up to our own.

Speaker 6 (51:55):
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. And I think

(52:18):
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

(52:39):
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.

Speaker 5 (52:51):
That could be a good thing, wonderful.

Speaker 3 (52:53):
Well, I look forward to all these developments in the
process of science itself and our social relationship with science.
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, if you had to choose,
would you rather live in Virginia or California?

Speaker 6 (53:11):
Oh? Oh, oh, my gosh, Okay, I mean but California.

Speaker 3 (53:22):
Thank 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.

Speaker 5 (53:33):
Absolutely, thank you, great to talk.

Speaker 3 (53:56):
We're back and today we're talking about the process of
science 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,

(54:17):
San Diego. He's also the co director of the Arthur C.
Clark 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 of volume two,
focused like a Nobel Prize winner will be talking about today,

(54:38):
and he's the host of the End of 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.

Speaker 2 (54:48):
Ah, it's great to see you, you know, yeah, it's
always great to be with you.

Speaker 3 (54:52):
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?

Speaker 2 (55:11):
Well, I think you know it's it's called the I
think it's called the Matthew effect. So say Matthew said,
the rich get richer effectively. So it started off, as
you said, with the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination,
and we were blessed here to have people like Freeman
Dyson and you know, a local on staff, and so

(55:31):
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
a thing that I could say. And then after you know,
getting people like him, then a Nobel laureate like Roger Penrose,
who I knew before he was a Nobel laureate.

Speaker 7 (55:48):
Some say, you know, responsible for it, but that's just me.

Speaker 3 (55:52):
People are saying, yeah.

Speaker 7 (55:54):
The voices in my skull.

Speaker 2 (55:56):
And then other just great luminaries would come to give
a colloquial very parish or you know, people like that.
And then I thought 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 you know, wouldn't share that with the California
taxpayers and with the locals that couldn't make it the campus.

(56:18):
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. Well, 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

(56:40):
two are American or three are American, and so it
was hard to get you know them, especially because they
they're sick of getting asked.

Speaker 7 (56:46):
So, what's it like?

Speaker 2 (56:47):
To be a woman, you know, so I try not
to do that. So but for this volume, the second volume,
I did get the opportunity to speak to Donna Strickland,
who is an amazing experimentalist and hilarious and disarming and
ultimately incredibly gracious. I've interviewed twenty two so far, including
I have his.

Speaker 7 (57:07):
Books, some maround.

Speaker 2 (57:08):
Here the guy who invented viagra, doctor leuig Naro, who's
at UCLA not far from you. And here's my twenty
second interview. And after the second group of nine, so eighteen,
I decided I'd put out another volume.

Speaker 7 (57:21):
And that's where we're at today.

Speaker 3 (57:23):
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.

Speaker 7 (57:30):
I think that's tran.

Speaker 3 (57:31):
You know. I want to dig into in a minute
what you think their methods have in common. But what
do you think there are 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.
What are those moments have in common?

Speaker 2 (57:49):
Yeah, I mean, there's just a 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 uh, 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

(58:10):
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 that least this type of paralysis where
you're like, not sure, and so what do you do
as a good science You just keep collecting data. And
I think the thing that separates these individuals from you

(58:31):
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,
make it whole. And and I think that that kind
of courage is rare. It's rare and individuals, let alone
and scientists. So I think that ability to see that

(58:52):
they've done enough that like the perfect is the enemy
of the good, enough that you know, once you've established
this thing, is now 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,
and it's not enough for you to think you're brilliant.
I mean, only one person in this whole collection of
twenty two people has admitted to me that they deserved

(59:16):
the Noble Prize. Like, you know, there was something they
were gone for their whole life. They knew where they
were going to win it. It was preternaturally preordained.

Speaker 3 (59:23):
Yeah, 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?

Speaker 2 (59:34):
Some say that they are lucky a lot just never
stop working on stuff, and 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.

Speaker 4 (59:48):
You know.

Speaker 2 (59:48):
For example, I talked to Georgio 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 glass to your 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

(01:00:11):
kind of predict that I'm gonna, you know, 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 so ten symmetry group, after looking at spin
glasses and so forth. So a lot of them have
these very tortured paths to the Nobel Prize. But their

(01:00:33):
intellects are just such of such a magnitude that it's
sort of obvious.

Speaker 7 (01:00:39):
In hindsight that they would get to this level.

Speaker 3 (01:00:41):
And what about their daily habits? Is there anything they
have in common? You know, do they all start with
the same super espresso or do they all you know,
like block out timed for themselves, or is there anything
there that's like very concrete that we can extract from
their success.

Speaker 2 (01:00:58):
Unfortunately, no, there's no like you know, special cereal, you know,
Wheedi's or sweeties or.

Speaker 7 (01:01:06):
Something like that.

Speaker 2 (01:01:07):
But there are you know, kind of traits I would
say there 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 if that's tedious or and I
found it, you know, a little bit depressing, because what

(01:01:30):
we do is experimental scientists working on big projects. Almost
none of it, at least in my experiences, 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

(01:01:53):
want to you know, ingest the right volume of air
to cool the turbines. You 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, oh, 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 so it's rare that we

(01:02:13):
get to spend time like thinking about the cosmic macure 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 a commonality I observe in
their current state as I got to observe them collapsed
in that way from me.

Speaker 3 (01:02:31):
And 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's 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?

Speaker 2 (01:02:55):
Yeah, I think it's the fields and the amount of
knowledge has expanded so much done it's it's basically impossible
even when you focus on one subfield, sub sub subfield
or you know, substances is a subfield, and 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

(01:03:16):
incredibly fascinating when you see that they could do so
many other things. You know, Ryan hard Genzel 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.

(01:03:39):
You know, he really pioneered along with our colleague in
the University of California, Andrea I Guez, this this concept
application rather of adaptive optics to being up the black
hole in the Milky Way Center as a laboratory to
test general relativity.

Speaker 7 (01:03:54):
So there's so many things there.

Speaker 2 (01:03:55):
He could have gotten into optics, he could have gotten
into general relativity, experimental, he could have done more stuff.

Speaker 7 (01:04:02):
But he could have also gone into.

Speaker 2 (01:04:04):
You know, DARPA, and you know, would they use these
the same techniques in for example, in adaptive optics, where
we have these deformable mirrors that compensate for the distortion
of the Earth's lens like atmosphere that causes stars to twinkle, twinkle,
Little Star.

Speaker 7 (01:04:21):
He could have applied that.

Speaker 2 (01:04:22):
As they do now to like sniper scopes, you know,
which is an application of adaptive optics that you know
is for military purposes. But there's many other things, artificial guides.

Speaker 7 (01:04:31):
A lot of the.

Speaker 2 (01:04:31):
Technology was classified, you know in the US at least,
so he could have done a multitude of things.

Speaker 7 (01:04:37):
But that's really what he's done.

Speaker 2 (01:04:39):
And I think you know it's but it's he's only
he's the literal next generation after Charles Towns, also a
U see, you know, professor fellow of ours and and
he you know, is known for extremely broad knowledge. I mean,
he credits his his ability to blow glass. I don't
know if knew that he went to like house in

(01:05:00):
some small school had a 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 fials
that were then used to do maser stimulation. That led
to the mazer and then the laser, and then he
got into like looking for aliens and optical search for

(01:05:23):
extraterrestrial intelligence and adaptive optic just incredibly, so that was
one generation between him and his advisy is his student
Reinhart Gonzel and yet you know he could do it
and it was I don't think Reinhart'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.

(01:05:46):
I'm not talking about outside the lot, I'm talking about
inside your own field.

Speaker 7 (01:05:50):
How do you focus?

Speaker 2 (01:05:51):
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 success, and I wish
I had done that. You know, I'm glad that I
have kind of a broad education, not just to within
physics but outside of physics. But I think there's a
lot greater path to success to do something that only

(01:06:13):
you can do.

Speaker 3 (01:06:14):
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 and 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 Tokomac would turn on and ignite next year for

(01:06:36):
the last ten years. So how do you know when
to focus?

Speaker 2 (01:06:39):
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.

Speaker 7 (01:06:51):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:06:52):
In other words, you had to find your path and
then you followed the course that led to success. In
your case, I 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 are my ability

(01:07:13):
to maintain This is not the subject at all. I
think 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.

Speaker 3 (01:07:28):
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 thirty or something. 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.

Speaker 7 (01:07:48):
Most of them did make it as young people.

Speaker 3 (01:07:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:07:52):
Well, well here's the thing though, Well, first time we 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 yourself as a professional.
So getting on track early is I think, you know,
a cornerstone. So they all got on track that some

(01:08:13):
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 Thorn is probably the exception
that he really did the work that I want him
the Nobel Prize in his fifties, you know, if you'd
think about it. But the groundwork was laid in his
twenties and thirties, so I think that's important to know.
But but the way that they get to it, everyone

(01:08:35):
gets to Sweden in a different way.

Speaker 3 (01:08:37):
So talking to all these folks, has it changed the
way that you do science?

Speaker 2 (01:08:41):
Well, first of all, I had an unhealthy obsession with
the Nobel Prize as a as a kid, as a
young scientist, as I wrote about in my first book,
Losing the Nobel Prize, which is a memoir about, you know,
the bicep affair of thinking we discovered cosmic inflationary gravitational
waves and then having to re track that, and then
you know the aftermath of that, biting the dust as

(01:09:04):
you called it, very painfully.

Speaker 7 (01:09:06):
So damn it. I'm still smarting from that.

Speaker 2 (01:09:08):
But in reality, yeah, how do you recover? How do
you do science? How do you compete with your colleagues
and 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 Ervine too, you know we're

(01:09:30):
teaching here's a Nobel Prize winning experiment, here's some of
these things took forty years to get to work, and
we just do it in an afternoon. So I think there,
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. Bary Barrass wrote
the forward to the first volume, Think like a Nobel Prize,

(01:09:51):
and you know, he said that he had the imposter
syndrome even worse after he won the Nobel Prize than
he did before it.

Speaker 7 (01:10:00):
I said, what are you talking about? He said, well,
when you went in.

Speaker 2 (01:10:02):
About prize keating, you'll never know this feeling. But you
go to Stockholm and you get this huge gold medal,
like you know, flava flame, and they want to make
sure that you confirm that you got your prize due
to you, and so they make you sign this book,
this ledger that has every single Nobel laureate in physics
back to the beginning in nineteen o one with the

(01:10:24):
invention of the X ray by Wilhelm Renken. And so
Barry tells me in twenty you know, twenty twenty that
when he won it in twenty seventeen, he went there
and he's a curious guy and he's turns the pages
in the book and he sees, you know, oh my god,
there's there's fine man, Oh my god, there's you know,
Madame Currie, Oh my god, there's Einstein. And he said

(01:10:47):
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. First 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

(01:11:11):
contributions to science will never be matched again. And I said,
but that's not all, Arry, because Isaac Newton had the
imposter syndrome. And now he's like, oh, you gotta 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.

Speaker 7 (01:11:29):
Wow Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 (01:11:30):
Okay, in fact, he reputedly died of virgin in order
to emulate the only way he could emulate. You know,
couldn't turn loaves into fishes, water into wine, but he
could die of virgin and in fact he did.

Speaker 7 (01:11:42):
But some say that was because of his.

Speaker 3 (01:11:43):
Personality, Like the first inel. That's right.

Speaker 7 (01:11:48):
So it's changed me.

Speaker 2 (01:11:50):
I think to not venerate the prize as much as
I do. Think it's type of idol on So one.

Speaker 3 (01:11:55):
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

(01:12:16):
path through a changing field, you know, which is different
from the field that we grew up in and will
be different in twenty years. What is your advice to
the next generation.

Speaker 7 (01:12:23):
That's exactly right.

Speaker 2 (01:12:24):
So for me, it's 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 that no, no, I'm just kidding.

(01:12:46):
I never do that out there. Peta but you can
melt an army man, right, You ever did that there?

Speaker 7 (01:12:51):
Yeah, But you can't just hold them up in the sun.

Speaker 3 (01:12:55):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:12:55):
So you have to concentrate, You have to focus, you
have to conserve it and narrow 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 an important urgent you know,
and whatever.

Speaker 7 (01:13:14):
Different spectrum of tasks.

Speaker 2 (01:13:16):
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
there's a saying in the business world like if you
want something done right, ask someone who's too busy to
do it, because 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, ninety percent of

(01:13:38):
the work. There might be ten percent that do ninety
percent ork And those people they're so oversubscribed that their
energy is so drained or 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

(01:13:59):
to say on energy, and do that by having appropriate
boundaries in time and in space.

Speaker 3 (01:14:05):
All right, well, thanks very much. The book is called
Into the Impossible, Volume two Focus like end Nobel Prize winner,
Thanks very much for coming and telling us about all
the wisdom you've gleaned from all of these successful stories.

Speaker 7 (01:14:18):
Thank you, Daniel.

Speaker 2 (01:14:19):
I want to get back to your audience too, because
I love the audience and your audience is kind of
a 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.

Speaker 7 (01:14:30):
I think I've given them to Daniel.

Speaker 3 (01:14:32):
I have one here on my shelf.

Speaker 2 (01:14:33):
Yes, give them to your kids and so to get
one if you're in academia, like my ideal target demographic,
just go to Brian Keating dot com slash edu and
sign up for my mailing list, which I sent out
every Monday with some cool stuff including appearances like this
and thoughts on academia and life as a scientist, et cetera.
So Brian Kane dot com slash du with your edu

(01:14:55):
email address, and if you live in the USA, you
will get one of these beauties that was delivered by gravity,
not the US Postal Service.

Speaker 3 (01:15:02):
I will deliver it amazing. And you can also catch
Brian on his podcast Into the Impossible. All right, Thanks
very much, Brian, Thanks Dan.

Speaker 1 (01:15:18):
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Speaker 3 (01:15:23):
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