October 23, 2025 • 17 mins
George Noory and Dr. Brian Keating discuss the mysterious interstellar object known as 3I/ATLAS, if it could be an asteroid or possibly an alien spacecraft, the continuing research into dark energy in the universe, and how objects in space could prove the existence of God.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back to Coast to Coast George nor are
you with you? Along with doctor Brian Keating. One of
his books includes Focus Like a Nobel Prize winner. We'll
talk about that in a moment, Brian, I'm going to
give you some scenarios for three IAD lists and give
you your thoughts on that. You ready, Yeah, let's do it.
It's a comment, yes or no? What do you think?
Speaker 3 (00:25):
Well, you know, scientists don't like to give yes or
no question answers because that kind of makes it seem
like we're certain about our answers. So instead we do
Baysian or likelihoods. So I'll say the likelihood of it
being a natural comment to me is about seventy five percent.
I wouldn't say it's a slam dunk. You certainly wouldn't
(00:47):
get on an airplane if you thought it would have
a only twenty five percent chance of making it, you know,
out of it in time. So I'd say about twenty
about seventy five percent or so. An asteroid asteroid is
sort of similar to a comment, except this one has
some bizarre features. In its composition. It seems to have
(01:11):
an anomalous amount of more rare ratios of cobalt, nickel
and very highly magnetic attributes, which could be an asteroid.
But we know for certain it's not from our solar system.
Nobody's disputing that it came from another solar system, and
in fact, that solar system has other worlds within it.
(01:32):
The question is did one of those worlds make this
object or are they still guiding or piloting it.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
It's a meteor.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
Meteors or effectively what we call asteroids when they start
to enter the Earth's atmosphere. So it would go along
with the probability maybe thirty percent of it being an asteroid.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
It's an alien probian craft.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
Well there, you have to be very careful. It could
be it could be alien craft. It could be an
alien garbage barge. It could be you know, alien advertising
billboard for something we don't know, so alien, let's just
take alien in general. I'd say, from my perspective, much
less than one percent, but not zero. I would never
(02:20):
say it's zero. I mean, the odds of us being
alone are extremely extremely small by one calculation, but another calculation.
You look at the odds of us being here having
this conversation, and they too are astronomically low, so I
wouldn't rule it out, but I think it's the least plausible.
And I've told Avi this.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
I'm not telling tales out of school right now. There's
three to one add lists similar to Amu and Moa.
It is.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
It's very similar to it in many ways. That first
one and most importantly is it's interstellar. That om was,
you know, instead of three I is one eye. It
was really the first ever detected object from another solar
system that we knew for sure was not created or
formed in our solar system. That was really exciting. That
(03:11):
was only in twenty seventeen. George, Don't forget we haven't
known about these types of objects. We've speculated on them.
People thought they could exist. And I told Abby at
the time when he wrote his first book about Omoamua,
that you know, if I were him, I would maybe
devote some of the billions of dollars at Harvard. Nowadays
(03:31):
they're kind of strapped for cash next to the Trump administration,
but back then they were kind of rich, and they said,
you know, why don't you get some of that Harvard
money and build a spacecraft to go chase after it.
And at that time Abby told me, no, don't worry, Brian,
There'll be many more that come. And I said, well,
you don't know that for sure. Where As you do
know for sure that this object of Muamoua, which you
(03:53):
claim could plausibly be alien technology or alien evidence again,
garbage barge or whatever, it doesn't have to be a
piloted craft. So I said, Abby, you're giving up this chance,
and he said no, there'll be many more. So at
that time I felt like, well, I don't want to wait.
If you knew something was really carrying this precious cargo
(04:13):
or this precious signature, you do anything in your power
to go after it. But he hasn't taken me up
on that. He has instead looked very deeply into ways
You can detect objects through a variety of different means,
including audio you know which appeals to you and me
as radio and podcast defficionados, to light flashes, to things
(04:35):
you know that go make strange signs in the sky,
as was just announced yesterday. I mean this, as I said,
this month this year has been extraordinary. Not only are
there comments you can see with your naked eye right
after sunset and from a dark place on Earth that's
called Comet lemon or with a small telescope that's called
Comet Swan. But yesterday, two days ago, assigned to in Europe,
(05:00):
announced that she had found and published this data. She
published it in Precidious Journal that they had found evidence
for non trivial or non natural reflections of light in
Earth orbit prior to nineteen fifty seven. Also October nineteen
fifty seven, George, you remember what happened in October nineteen
(05:22):
fifty seven.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
October nineteen fifty seven Spotnik Spotnik.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
So these data were collected in nineteen fifty two, in full,
five years before spot Nek. And she claims it could
be relic technology that existed in geostationary orbit. We talked
about the moon. The Moon's in a geosynchronous orbit of
a kind. But besides that and maybe that mini moon
(05:48):
you mentioned at the very top, we don't know many
things that could reproduce these signals. So it's an incredibly
exciting time for extra solar, extraterrestrial perhaps technology or just observation.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Ryan, was it new technology that allowed us to find
out about three ied list and a more and more,
I would.
Speaker 3 (06:07):
Say it wasn't necessarily new technology that allowed us to
find them. Uh, the big telescope in Hawaii that was
really an Air Force monitoring telescope. Don't forget these objects
could be, according to AVI, trojan horses. You know that
even if they're you know, sort of benign, we don't
know what treasure you know on the outside applies for
(06:29):
what lurks within it. So I think you know Avi's
point is, let's be cautious about these things, these so
but so too. When you find things that could be
extraterrestrial intelligence and technology. The same tools that discover that
are good at looking for natural human based technology like
missiles or you know, a Chinese spacecraft that is doing
(06:51):
something in space. So the same tools that the Air
Force was very interested in looking for satellites and spy
devices and balloons and stuff like that throughout to be
very good at finding interstellar objects. Now that being said,
there's a new telescope that came on just this past
may even much more recent than the last time you
and I spoke a couple of years ago, called the
(07:13):
Verra Ruben Observatory in Chile. And this is a phenomenal.
Truly knew never before deployed type of technological tool the many,
you know, twelve twenty feet across something like that, with
a camera that scans the sky every moment of every night,
and they found George. In just about ten hours of data,
(07:35):
they found two thousand, two thousand asteroids that had never
been discovered before. Now imagine if just you know, zero
point one percent of them could hit the Earth. That's
two of them, and they found that in just ten hours.
They're going to go for the next ten years, George.
At that rate, they're going to discover millions of objects.
That technology did not exist before this instrument was deployed,
(07:58):
nor did the technology the artificial intelligence and machine learning
tools to analyze all that fire hose of data. So
this is an incredibly exciting time to be an astronomer.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Brian, you've talked about dark energy, that it could be weakening.
Explain what dark energy is and what you mean by weakening.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
So dark energy was really postulated by Einstein himself. Again,
he was the greatest scientist that ever lived. In some
people's estimation, he certainly ranks up there in mind. He
was working in the early nineteen hundreds, and he only
had the data of his time, and at that point
(08:38):
it's hard to imagine George. But people didn't know what
other galaxies were in nineteen fifteen. They thought there were
just smudges of light called nebulae. And it wasn't until
Hubble proved that those galaxy, those nebulae were actually other
island universes with just like the Milky Way has one
hundred billion stars in each one. They were at great distances.
(09:00):
They weren't in our Milky Way. They were like our
Milky Way, but much much farther away. That wasn't known
in Einstein's time. So he said, as a good physicist,
I have to account for the data and observations I
have at hand. It looks like the universe is our galaxy,
and our galaxy doesn't look like it's expanding. It doesn't
look like it's expanding or contracting like normal matter will
(09:22):
gravitationally attract like anybody who's throwing a baseball up in
the air and noose. So in that sense, Einstein did
what was prudent. He said, I have to insert something
in my equation to keep the universe from collapsing on itself.
Otherwise we wouldn't be here to ask the question of
why do we exist? Because gravity would have sucked all
the matter, all the stars, all the planets into a
(09:44):
black hole. So we shouldn't exist. So there must be
some other force, some repulsive gravity, and that he called
the cosmological constant, and that is what we for many
decades dismissed dark energy because we saw the versus expanding.
But in late nineteen nineties, astronomers discovered that actually the
(10:06):
galaxies aren't just expanding away from us every day. The
rate of expansion is accelerating. That means not only would
be farther apart tomorrow, it's like someone's flooring the cosmic accelerator.
And because of that we had to reinvoke dark energy,
which Einstein had discarded as his biggest blunder. Nowadays, let's
fast forward from nineteen ninety seven when dark energy was
(10:29):
discovered until just this year. The DESI Dark Energy Spectroscopic
Instrument has been operating for the better part of ten
years now, and that team released data that suggests that
the rate of acceleration is decreasing. So follow this with me, George.
The universe is expanding, it's expanding we know that's expanding
(10:51):
at the Hubble constant rate. That's a constant rate of expansion. However,
we discover that the rate of expansion increased about five
billion years ago in the universe's history. Now we see
that at later times the universe is acceleration. It's still accelerating,
but someone's letting off the gas, so that dark energy
is decreasing. And many astronomers think that's a sign that
(11:17):
our understanding of dark energy has to be modified. But
it's really exciting because we cannot experiment with this stuff.
It's not like flubber, it's not like something we can
play around with in the lab. George. Only way we
can do it is when we use the universe, the
entire universe as our laboratory, where the atoms in the
(11:37):
universe in the laboratory are actual galaxies. So it's incredibly
painstaking data. It takes a lot of attention to detail.
Machine learning, artificial intelligence and my colleagues have been working
on this. They seem to be confident, but it's very controversial.
We don't really understand if this result will stand up
to scrutiny, but it does seem like something weird is
(11:59):
going on. It makes it for a very exciting time
for astronomers.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Again. By the way, I want a promotional contest. When
I was about eleven for flubber.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Ver you goet.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
That beats my you know, egg drop experiment where I
ruined my mom's dozen eggs.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Flubber is the thing to buy. Once you bounce it,
watch it fly. They love that.
Speaker 3 (12:22):
That's great.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
What do you think of the universe, Brian? The complexity
of the universe. We're going to get into how you
think it was formed. But it seems like everything has
a purpose and has order to it, doesn't it.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
In many ways it does.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
You know.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
When we look at the majestic patterns of the of say, galaxies,
we find that there are patterns that keep repeating. Whether
it's the fact that we are in a solar system
where there are many patterns of different objects and these
objects have a certain phenomena in common with each other.
From the tiny little asteroids comments meteors, meteoroids all the
(13:04):
way up to the giant gas planets like Jupiter, Saturn
and Neptune Uranus. Those objects of nothing like us, and
yet and yet we are in a relationship with them.
We have properties that are similar to them. The thing
that's so interesting to me about the universe, I think
the only two interesting questions that I ever want to
know the answer to is what happened on the Tuesday
(13:26):
before the Big Bang? You know, was there a universe
before our universe? And is there life in the universe?
That's technological, that's conscience that we can have in a
relationship with We just don't know. And so the most
delightful and frustrating aspect of the universe is that it's
just comprehensible enough to kind of get your appetite really
(13:51):
fired up, but you may never be able to see
or hear or learn the answers to these most fascinating questions.
I think of God, Brian, Well, you know, I am
what I call myself is a practicing devout agnostic, meaning
most of my colleagues, George, are atheists. They affirm the
(14:13):
belief that there is no God. There are very few
non atheists in the foxhole of science, and I think
that's partially due to arrogance. We think of scientists that
we can explain everything, when in reality we have to
have a concession that we don't know what happened at
the very beginning. We don't know how life began. We
don't know what consciousness is, let alone how it arises.
(14:36):
So I think the most humble way is to be scientific.
For me, I look for answers, I look for data.
I approach God as a puzzle, as a mystery. Again,
I may never be able to solve this puzzle, but
it doesn't for it doesn't mean I have an excuse
not to grapple with it. I think a lot of
(14:56):
people think of God as scientists. They think of God
as a eye and a white beard and floating around
in space. I think that's infantile. I also don't believe
in that. George. However, I think when you dismiss it
as infantile in that way, then you kind of say, oh,
I'm not going to take it seriously. But I think
that's a cop out. I think most of my colleagues
cop out. They're scared to admit to the responsibility they
(15:19):
would have to have if God were true. So I
search for God, but I don't let it God. I
don't replace my searching for evidence with faith or belief.
I think they can be compatible, but you have to
separate those two domains.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Do you ever explain the Big Bang to people.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
All the time, But it's extremely difficult because even to
my children, you know, I'm always curious about it. At
some point they'll say, you know, why did this happen?
Why did this happen? By the way, I think that's
sometimes I give a lot of credit to my religious friends,
but also sometimes I say to them, look, if you
say God does everything, everything's a miracle, like a rainbow
(15:58):
is a miracle. If you just said that, as many
people believe that it's just a pure miracle. Yes, it's miraculous,
but we understand it very accurately through diffraction, through color theory,
through water droplets and scattering, and so we understand it. Now.
You may ask, at the very beginning of all, how
did the hydrogen first get there? Well, that's an open question.
(16:18):
We have to discover, you know, as far back as
we can and only invoke God in a sense to
fill in those gaps. And I know a lot of
scientists don't like that. But at the same time, I
think of the Big Bang, as you know, it could
be perhaps incomprehensible, but it could. George, if some of
my colleagues believe that our universe came about because another
(16:39):
universe collapsed and died and sort of sacrificed itself for
our existence. It's very you know, scatological in sense. So
in that sense the Big Bang, isn't that, you know,
isn't that surprising? Or isn't that you know? Difficult to
comprehend because it would come about because another universe died. Now,
the incomprehensible one is how did it emerge from nothing?
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to coastam
dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back to Coast to Coast George nor are
you with you? Along with doctor Brian Keating. One of
his books includes Focus Like a Nobel Prize winner. We'll
talk about that in a moment, Brian, I'm going to
give you some scenarios for three IAD lists and give
you your thoughts on that. You ready, Yeah, let's do it.
It's a comment, yes or no? What do you think?
Speaker 3 (00:25):
Well, you know, scientists don't like to give yes or
no question answers because that kind of makes it seem
like we're certain about our answers. So instead we do
Baysian or likelihoods. So I'll say the likelihood of it
being a natural comment to me is about seventy five percent.
I wouldn't say it's a slam dunk. You certainly wouldn't
(00:47):
get on an airplane if you thought it would have
a only twenty five percent chance of making it, you know,
out of it in time. So I'd say about twenty
about seventy five percent or so. An asteroid asteroid is
sort of similar to a comment, except this one has
some bizarre features. In its composition. It seems to have
(01:11):
an anomalous amount of more rare ratios of cobalt, nickel
and very highly magnetic attributes, which could be an asteroid.
But we know for certain it's not from our solar system.
Nobody's disputing that it came from another solar system, and
in fact, that solar system has other worlds within it.
(01:32):
The question is did one of those worlds make this
object or are they still guiding or piloting it.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
It's a meteor.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
Meteors or effectively what we call asteroids when they start
to enter the Earth's atmosphere. So it would go along
with the probability maybe thirty percent of it being an asteroid.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
It's an alien probian craft.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
Well there, you have to be very careful. It could
be it could be alien craft. It could be an
alien garbage barge. It could be you know, alien advertising
billboard for something we don't know, so alien, let's just
take alien in general. I'd say, from my perspective, much
less than one percent, but not zero. I would never
(02:20):
say it's zero. I mean, the odds of us being
alone are extremely extremely small by one calculation, but another calculation.
You look at the odds of us being here having
this conversation, and they too are astronomically low, so I
wouldn't rule it out, but I think it's the least plausible.
And I've told Avi this.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
I'm not telling tales out of school right now. There's
three to one add lists similar to Amu and Moa.
It is.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
It's very similar to it in many ways. That first
one and most importantly is it's interstellar. That om was,
you know, instead of three I is one eye. It
was really the first ever detected object from another solar
system that we knew for sure was not created or
formed in our solar system. That was really exciting. That
(03:11):
was only in twenty seventeen. George, Don't forget we haven't
known about these types of objects. We've speculated on them.
People thought they could exist. And I told Abby at
the time when he wrote his first book about Omoamua,
that you know, if I were him, I would maybe
devote some of the billions of dollars at Harvard. Nowadays
(03:31):
they're kind of strapped for cash next to the Trump administration,
but back then they were kind of rich, and they said,
you know, why don't you get some of that Harvard
money and build a spacecraft to go chase after it.
And at that time Abby told me, no, don't worry, Brian,
There'll be many more that come. And I said, well,
you don't know that for sure. Where As you do
know for sure that this object of Muamoua, which you
(03:53):
claim could plausibly be alien technology or alien evidence again,
garbage barge or whatever, it doesn't have to be a
piloted craft. So I said, Abby, you're giving up this chance,
and he said no, there'll be many more. So at
that time I felt like, well, I don't want to wait.
If you knew something was really carrying this precious cargo
(04:13):
or this precious signature, you do anything in your power
to go after it. But he hasn't taken me up
on that. He has instead looked very deeply into ways
You can detect objects through a variety of different means,
including audio you know which appeals to you and me
as radio and podcast defficionados, to light flashes, to things
(04:35):
you know that go make strange signs in the sky,
as was just announced yesterday. I mean this, as I said,
this month this year has been extraordinary. Not only are
there comments you can see with your naked eye right
after sunset and from a dark place on Earth that's
called Comet lemon or with a small telescope that's called
Comet Swan. But yesterday, two days ago, assigned to in Europe,
(05:00):
announced that she had found and published this data. She
published it in Precidious Journal that they had found evidence
for non trivial or non natural reflections of light in
Earth orbit prior to nineteen fifty seven. Also October nineteen
fifty seven, George, you remember what happened in October nineteen
(05:22):
fifty seven.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
October nineteen fifty seven Spotnik Spotnik.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
So these data were collected in nineteen fifty two, in full,
five years before spot Nek. And she claims it could
be relic technology that existed in geostationary orbit. We talked
about the moon. The Moon's in a geosynchronous orbit of
a kind. But besides that and maybe that mini moon
(05:48):
you mentioned at the very top, we don't know many
things that could reproduce these signals. So it's an incredibly
exciting time for extra solar, extraterrestrial perhaps technology or just observation.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Ryan, was it new technology that allowed us to find
out about three ied list and a more and more,
I would.
Speaker 3 (06:07):
Say it wasn't necessarily new technology that allowed us to
find them. Uh, the big telescope in Hawaii that was
really an Air Force monitoring telescope. Don't forget these objects
could be, according to AVI, trojan horses. You know that
even if they're you know, sort of benign, we don't
know what treasure you know on the outside applies for
(06:29):
what lurks within it. So I think you know Avi's
point is, let's be cautious about these things, these so
but so too. When you find things that could be
extraterrestrial intelligence and technology. The same tools that discover that
are good at looking for natural human based technology like
missiles or you know, a Chinese spacecraft that is doing
(06:51):
something in space. So the same tools that the Air
Force was very interested in looking for satellites and spy
devices and balloons and stuff like that throughout to be
very good at finding interstellar objects. Now that being said,
there's a new telescope that came on just this past
may even much more recent than the last time you
and I spoke a couple of years ago, called the
(07:13):
Verra Ruben Observatory in Chile. And this is a phenomenal.
Truly knew never before deployed type of technological tool the many,
you know, twelve twenty feet across something like that, with
a camera that scans the sky every moment of every night,
and they found George. In just about ten hours of data,
(07:35):
they found two thousand, two thousand asteroids that had never
been discovered before. Now imagine if just you know, zero
point one percent of them could hit the Earth. That's
two of them, and they found that in just ten hours.
They're going to go for the next ten years, George.
At that rate, they're going to discover millions of objects.
That technology did not exist before this instrument was deployed,
(07:58):
nor did the technology the artificial intelligence and machine learning
tools to analyze all that fire hose of data. So
this is an incredibly exciting time to be an astronomer.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Brian, you've talked about dark energy, that it could be weakening.
Explain what dark energy is and what you mean by weakening.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
So dark energy was really postulated by Einstein himself. Again,
he was the greatest scientist that ever lived. In some
people's estimation, he certainly ranks up there in mind. He
was working in the early nineteen hundreds, and he only
had the data of his time, and at that point
(08:38):
it's hard to imagine George. But people didn't know what
other galaxies were in nineteen fifteen. They thought there were
just smudges of light called nebulae. And it wasn't until
Hubble proved that those galaxy, those nebulae were actually other
island universes with just like the Milky Way has one
hundred billion stars in each one. They were at great distances.
(09:00):
They weren't in our Milky Way. They were like our
Milky Way, but much much farther away. That wasn't known
in Einstein's time. So he said, as a good physicist,
I have to account for the data and observations I
have at hand. It looks like the universe is our galaxy,
and our galaxy doesn't look like it's expanding. It doesn't
look like it's expanding or contracting like normal matter will
(09:22):
gravitationally attract like anybody who's throwing a baseball up in
the air and noose. So in that sense, Einstein did
what was prudent. He said, I have to insert something
in my equation to keep the universe from collapsing on itself.
Otherwise we wouldn't be here to ask the question of
why do we exist? Because gravity would have sucked all
the matter, all the stars, all the planets into a
(09:44):
black hole. So we shouldn't exist. So there must be
some other force, some repulsive gravity, and that he called
the cosmological constant, and that is what we for many
decades dismissed dark energy because we saw the versus expanding.
But in late nineteen nineties, astronomers discovered that actually the
(10:06):
galaxies aren't just expanding away from us every day. The
rate of expansion is accelerating. That means not only would
be farther apart tomorrow, it's like someone's flooring the cosmic accelerator.
And because of that we had to reinvoke dark energy,
which Einstein had discarded as his biggest blunder. Nowadays, let's
fast forward from nineteen ninety seven when dark energy was
(10:29):
discovered until just this year. The DESI Dark Energy Spectroscopic
Instrument has been operating for the better part of ten
years now, and that team released data that suggests that
the rate of acceleration is decreasing. So follow this with me, George.
The universe is expanding, it's expanding we know that's expanding
(10:51):
at the Hubble constant rate. That's a constant rate of expansion. However,
we discover that the rate of expansion increased about five
billion years ago in the universe's history. Now we see
that at later times the universe is acceleration. It's still accelerating,
but someone's letting off the gas, so that dark energy
is decreasing. And many astronomers think that's a sign that
(11:17):
our understanding of dark energy has to be modified. But
it's really exciting because we cannot experiment with this stuff.
It's not like flubber, it's not like something we can
play around with in the lab. George. Only way we
can do it is when we use the universe, the
entire universe as our laboratory, where the atoms in the
(11:37):
universe in the laboratory are actual galaxies. So it's incredibly
painstaking data. It takes a lot of attention to detail.
Machine learning, artificial intelligence and my colleagues have been working
on this. They seem to be confident, but it's very controversial.
We don't really understand if this result will stand up
to scrutiny, but it does seem like something weird is
(11:59):
going on. It makes it for a very exciting time
for astronomers.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Again. By the way, I want a promotional contest. When
I was about eleven for flubber.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Ver you goet.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
That beats my you know, egg drop experiment where I
ruined my mom's dozen eggs.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Flubber is the thing to buy. Once you bounce it,
watch it fly. They love that.
Speaker 3 (12:22):
That's great.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
What do you think of the universe, Brian? The complexity
of the universe. We're going to get into how you
think it was formed. But it seems like everything has
a purpose and has order to it, doesn't it.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
In many ways it does.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
You know.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
When we look at the majestic patterns of the of say, galaxies,
we find that there are patterns that keep repeating. Whether
it's the fact that we are in a solar system
where there are many patterns of different objects and these
objects have a certain phenomena in common with each other.
From the tiny little asteroids comments meteors, meteoroids all the
(13:04):
way up to the giant gas planets like Jupiter, Saturn
and Neptune Uranus. Those objects of nothing like us, and
yet and yet we are in a relationship with them.
We have properties that are similar to them. The thing
that's so interesting to me about the universe, I think
the only two interesting questions that I ever want to
know the answer to is what happened on the Tuesday
(13:26):
before the Big Bang? You know, was there a universe
before our universe? And is there life in the universe?
That's technological, that's conscience that we can have in a
relationship with We just don't know. And so the most
delightful and frustrating aspect of the universe is that it's
just comprehensible enough to kind of get your appetite really
(13:51):
fired up, but you may never be able to see
or hear or learn the answers to these most fascinating questions.
I think of God, Brian, Well, you know, I am
what I call myself is a practicing devout agnostic, meaning
most of my colleagues, George, are atheists. They affirm the
(14:13):
belief that there is no God. There are very few
non atheists in the foxhole of science, and I think
that's partially due to arrogance. We think of scientists that
we can explain everything, when in reality we have to
have a concession that we don't know what happened at
the very beginning. We don't know how life began. We
don't know what consciousness is, let alone how it arises.
(14:36):
So I think the most humble way is to be scientific.
For me, I look for answers, I look for data.
I approach God as a puzzle, as a mystery. Again,
I may never be able to solve this puzzle, but
it doesn't for it doesn't mean I have an excuse
not to grapple with it. I think a lot of
(14:56):
people think of God as scientists. They think of God
as a eye and a white beard and floating around
in space. I think that's infantile. I also don't believe
in that. George. However, I think when you dismiss it
as infantile in that way, then you kind of say, oh,
I'm not going to take it seriously. But I think
that's a cop out. I think most of my colleagues
cop out. They're scared to admit to the responsibility they
(15:19):
would have to have if God were true. So I
search for God, but I don't let it God. I
don't replace my searching for evidence with faith or belief.
I think they can be compatible, but you have to
separate those two domains.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Do you ever explain the Big Bang to people.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
All the time, But it's extremely difficult because even to
my children, you know, I'm always curious about it. At
some point they'll say, you know, why did this happen?
Why did this happen? By the way, I think that's
sometimes I give a lot of credit to my religious friends,
but also sometimes I say to them, look, if you
say God does everything, everything's a miracle, like a rainbow
(15:58):
is a miracle. If you just said that, as many
people believe that it's just a pure miracle. Yes, it's miraculous,
but we understand it very accurately through diffraction, through color theory,
through water droplets and scattering, and so we understand it. Now.
You may ask, at the very beginning of all, how
did the hydrogen first get there? Well, that's an open question.
(16:18):
We have to discover, you know, as far back as
we can and only invoke God in a sense to
fill in those gaps. And I know a lot of
scientists don't like that. But at the same time, I
think of the Big Bang, as you know, it could
be perhaps incomprehensible, but it could. George, if some of
my colleagues believe that our universe came about because another
(16:39):
universe collapsed and died and sort of sacrificed itself for
our existence. It's very you know, scatological in sense. So
in that sense the Big Bang, isn't that, you know,
isn't that surprising? Or isn't that you know? Difficult to
comprehend because it would come about because another universe died. Now,
the incomprehensible one is how did it emerge from nothing?
Speaker 1 (17:00):
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George Noory
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