https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzVgczQtC7I These 50 Minutes Will Change How You See the Universe. Astrophysicist Brian Keating 20 Jun 2026 Gleb Solomin Podcast (Contd) picture, not looking at the universe as you could see it, but as you might have been able to feel it. The waves of 4:11 gravity that are produced during the Big Bang explosion should have left an imprint on our 4:18 detectors that we can see today. And we claim we saw that. We said we saw the exact signal in what's called the cosmic 4:25 microwave background radiation surrounding the Earth, surrounding every star, surrounding every galaxy is an 4:33 invisible bath of heat. That heat came about because of the fusion of the very 4:39 first elements on the periodic table. This is predicted by the great Russian cosmologist George Gamov that there 4:46 would be a leftover signature an explosion if you will leaves a heat 4:51 relic behind. And in fact we claim we discovered not only that relic that heat 4:56 but the imprint of the universe's birth on that heat. There was just one thing 5:02 in our way. There are many many different signals that can masquerade 5:07 and portray themselves as the cosmic microwave backgrounds polarization the 5:12 signal that we look for and this was a contamination. So if I understand correctly something 5:19 went wrong with the data and uh in the end it didn't confirm your theory. What 5:25 happened there? That's right. The operative word that you use is confirmation. 5:30 When you see something that you want to see, there's a bias to exclude things 5:36 that would be arguing that you didn't see that. And you fall in love with the 5:42 idea, the seduction that you may be the first person to ever discover something. 5:47 And you may be the next Galileo, Einstein, Newton, Zeldovich, whoever you 5:53 like, the most brilliant person alive. And that and science because science is 5:59 so hard and it takes so long to do stuff. You dedicate your life to something. It's very hard to overcome 6:05 the temptation to believe that you're right when in fact there's evidence screaming at you that you might be 6:10 wrong. You're one of the leading researchers on the origin of the universe. So I have to How Could Something Come from Nothing? 6:16 ask you the big question. How did the universe come from nothing? Well, it might not be so surprising if 6:23 you think about the progression of human knowledge in astronomy. Starting off, we 6:29 thought we were the center of the universe. Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher, said the natural tendency 6:35 of matter was to fall to the center. And therefore, since we see things as if 6:41 we're at the center, we must be the most important matter in the universe. And that led scientists astray. For 6:49 thousands of years, people believed the earth was a center of not just the solar system, not just the galaxy, but the 6:55 universe. And later we discovered actually we are orbiting around the sun. 7:02 And it's interesting, the sun is not the center of the universe. It's not even the center of the galaxy. There's not 7:07 even just one sun in our galaxy. There's a 100 billion plus. And guess what? 7:13 There's a trillion galaxies in the universe, each roing with a hundred 7:19 billion suns. So if you add up the numbers, we're nothing. We're almost 7:24 insignificant. Now take that one step further. If there's not just one planet, 7:30 if there's not just one star, if there's not just one galaxy, if there's not just one cluster of galaxies, why should
there just be one universe? That's the essence of the multiverse. The multiverse suggests just as we're
7:43
not the center of anything, we're certainly at the center of the universe. Therefore, let us explore the
7:49
possibility of multiple universes. And it seems to be from many different directions in science pointing us in
7:56
that conclusion that we should take it seriously. Maybe not literally, but seriously. And so, I don't want to speak
8:04
again like these breathless people like Mitchaku or Brian Green. you know, the
8:09
the hidden fabric of reality, all these metaphors. Okay, those are nice, but
8:15
where's the data? Is it just a facade meant to to keep people thinking that
8:20
we're making progress in science? Or is there something legitimate at its very core that we with hardware, with
8:27
instruments, with technology and tools like telescopes, can we get data and discover the truth? What happened the
8:34
day before the Big Bang? That's the most important question in all of science. And if we move on to the possible ideas
8:40
about the origin of the universe, which one do you find most convincing? How did it all begin? As a scientist, the most
Hypotheses on the Origin of the Universe
8:47
dangerous thing to say is, "I believe that." You should never say that as a
8:52
scientist that what you believe. I don't care what you believe. I care what you know. I care what facts you have. And so
8:58
for me, it's fine to speculate about these different things such as the multiverse, but we need evidence. And
9:04
the evidence right now is so far inconclusive. That's not a bad thing. As a scientist, that's very exciting. It
9:10
means that we can build new instruments to detect these signals that would reveal the presence of not just one
9:17
other universe, but maybe an infinite number of universes. That to me would be
9:22
incredibly exciting. The evidence that we might get with the Simons observatory that instrument is poised to perhaps
9:30
give us evidence that the theory of cosmological inflation took place. Now
9:35
this is a theory proposed in 1980 by a man named Alan Guth and this is the
9:42
theory that the universe began um from a unknown undiscovered so far
9:48
quantum field called the inflaton that fluctuated in a vacuum state. In quantum mechanics things can fluctuate into and
9:55
out of existence in the vacuum. And these fluctuations can produce matter and they can convert matter into energy
10:01
and there's no conservation of matter. matter can be created and destroyed at will. We do it thousands of times a second in our particle accelerators.
10:09
[snorts] And so it the same thing happened in the vacuum not of a particle accelerator at CERN but in the universe
10:15
at whole which would have to be the multiverse because it's only possible to have inflation it seems if there is a
10:22
multiverse for the infiloton to live in before it fluctuated to create our universe. Then the universe comes into
10:27
existence at a specific time and then there's downstream predictions, observables, um, fields and forces that
10:34
we can measure. We might discover that with the Simons observatory that one of
10:39
the signatures of this process called inflation happened and that's the thing
10:46
that we claim we did discover in 2014 and had to retract 6 months later.
10:51
That's the subject of my first book, Losing the Nobel Prize. That experiment is still ongoing. In other words, we and they are still trying to discover this signal, the aftershock of the big bang's inflationary epoch. And uh is there any way to prove we live in a multiverse? There are ways to prove the multiverse, How Can the Existence of a Multiverse Be Proven?
5 comments:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzVgczQtC7I
These 50 Minutes Will Change How You See the Universe. Astrophysicist Brian Keating 20 Jun 2026 Gleb Solomin Podcast (Contd) picture, not looking at the universe as you could see it, but as you might have been able to feel it. The waves of
4:11
gravity that are produced during the Big Bang explosion should have left an imprint on our
4:18
detectors that we can see today. And we claim we saw that. We said we saw the exact signal in what's called the cosmic
4:25
microwave background radiation surrounding the Earth, surrounding every star, surrounding every galaxy is an
4:33
invisible bath of heat. That heat came about because of the fusion of the very
4:39
first elements on the periodic table. This is predicted by the great Russian cosmologist George Gamov that there
4:46
would be a leftover signature an explosion if you will leaves a heat
4:51
relic behind. And in fact we claim we discovered not only that relic that heat
4:56
but the imprint of the universe's birth on that heat. There was just one thing
5:02
in our way. There are many many different signals that can masquerade
5:07
and portray themselves as the cosmic microwave backgrounds polarization the
5:12
signal that we look for and this was a contamination. So if I understand correctly something
5:19
went wrong with the data and uh in the end it didn't confirm your theory. What
5:25
happened there? That's right. The operative word that you use is confirmation.
5:30
When you see something that you want to see, there's a bias to exclude things
5:36
that would be arguing that you didn't see that. And you fall in love with the
5:42
idea, the seduction that you may be the first person to ever discover something.
5:47
And you may be the next Galileo, Einstein, Newton, Zeldovich, whoever you
5:53
like, the most brilliant person alive. And that and science because science is
5:59
so hard and it takes so long to do stuff. You dedicate your life to something. It's very hard to overcome
6:05
the temptation to believe that you're right when in fact there's evidence screaming at you that you might be
6:10
wrong. You're one of the leading researchers on the origin of the universe. So I have to
How Could Something Come from Nothing?
6:16
ask you the big question. How did the universe come from nothing? Well, it might not be so surprising if
6:23
you think about the progression of human knowledge in astronomy. Starting off, we
6:29
thought we were the center of the universe. Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher, said the natural tendency
6:35
of matter was to fall to the center. And therefore, since we see things as if
6:41
we're at the center, we must be the most important matter in the universe. And that led scientists astray. For
6:49
thousands of years, people believed the earth was a center of not just the solar system, not just the galaxy, but the
6:55
universe. And later we discovered actually we are orbiting around the sun.
7:02
And it's interesting, the sun is not the center of the universe. It's not even the center of the galaxy. There's not
7:07
even just one sun in our galaxy. There's a 100 billion plus. And guess what?
7:13
There's a trillion galaxies in the universe, each roing with a hundred
7:19
billion suns. So if you add up the numbers, we're nothing. We're almost
7:24
insignificant. Now take that one step further. If there's not just one planet,
7:30
if there's not just one star, if there's not just one galaxy, if there's not just one cluster of galaxies, why should
there just be one universe? That's the essence of the multiverse. The multiverse suggests just as we're
7:43
not the center of anything, we're certainly at the center of the universe. Therefore, let us explore the
7:49
possibility of multiple universes. And it seems to be from many different directions in science pointing us in
7:56
that conclusion that we should take it seriously. Maybe not literally, but seriously. And so, I don't want to speak
8:04
again like these breathless people like Mitchaku or Brian Green. you know, the
8:09
the hidden fabric of reality, all these metaphors. Okay, those are nice, but
8:15
where's the data? Is it just a facade meant to to keep people thinking that
8:20
we're making progress in science? Or is there something legitimate at its very core that we with hardware, with
8:27
instruments, with technology and tools like telescopes, can we get data and discover the truth? What happened the
8:34
day before the Big Bang? That's the most important question in all of science. And if we move on to the possible ideas
8:40
about the origin of the universe, which one do you find most convincing? How did it all begin? As a scientist, the most
Hypotheses on the Origin of the Universe
8:47
dangerous thing to say is, "I believe that." You should never say that as a
8:52
scientist that what you believe. I don't care what you believe. I care what you know. I care what facts you have. And so
8:58
for me, it's fine to speculate about these different things such as the multiverse, but we need evidence. And
9:04
the evidence right now is so far inconclusive. That's not a bad thing. As a scientist, that's very exciting. It
9:10
means that we can build new instruments to detect these signals that would reveal the presence of not just one
9:17
other universe, but maybe an infinite number of universes. That to me would be
9:22
incredibly exciting. The evidence that we might get with the Simons observatory that instrument is poised to perhaps
9:30
give us evidence that the theory of cosmological inflation took place. Now
9:35
this is a theory proposed in 1980 by a man named Alan Guth and this is the
9:42
theory that the universe began um from a unknown undiscovered so far
9:48
quantum field called the inflaton that fluctuated in a vacuum state. In quantum mechanics things can fluctuate into and
9:55
out of existence in the vacuum. And these fluctuations can produce matter and they can convert matter into energy
10:01
and there's no conservation of matter. matter can be created and destroyed at will. We do it thousands of times a second in our particle accelerators.
10:09
[snorts] And so it the same thing happened in the vacuum not of a particle accelerator at CERN but in the universe
10:15
at whole which would have to be the multiverse because it's only possible to have inflation it seems if there is a
10:22
multiverse for the infiloton to live in before it fluctuated to create our universe. Then the universe comes into
10:27
existence at a specific time and then there's downstream predictions, observables, um, fields and forces that
10:34
we can measure. We might discover that with the Simons observatory that one of
10:39
the signatures of this process called inflation happened and that's the thing
10:46
that we claim we did discover in 2014 and had to retract 6 months later.
10:51
That's the subject of my first book, Losing the Nobel Prize. That experiment is still ongoing. In other words, we and they are still trying to discover this signal, the aftershock of the big bang's inflationary epoch. And uh is there any way to prove we live in a multiverse? There are ways to prove the multiverse, How Can the Existence of a Multiverse Be Proven?
so to speak. You could actually come into contact just like you could prove that there's a boat over the horizon. It
11:15
could come over the horizon, right? You could see it even though right now you can't see it. Or you could hear it.
11:20
Maybe it makes a really loud explosion or it sends out some waves in the ocean that you then detect and trace back to
11:26
that boat. Those are all legitimate scientific ways to discover something beyond visual range beyond the horizon.
11:32
But in this case, we don't have evidence for that yet. So in the next year and a
11:38
half, we hope to get data which will not again prove or disprove, but it may give
11:44
us the first hints that inflation, this physical process took place. And it'll
11:50
be the earliest evidence that you could ever get tracing back to about a trillionth of a trillionth of a
11:56
trillionth of a second after the big bang. No one could ever claim to observe something earlier. So it's incredibly
12:02
exciting. Again, it won't prove, but it will give a lot of informatic
12:08
weight to the conclusion that our universe had an inflationary epoch, which then says there was likely a
12:14
multiverse type scenario. It's amazing how much we've already learned about reality. You mentioned the big bang
12:20
theory, but are there other ideas about how the universe began? Yeah. So, the big bang is one of many
12:28
different possibilities. There is it is um was believed for a long time the
12:33
universe was static, unchanging, never born, never going to die. Even the
12:39
proponents of that of which one of them was Fred Hoy who I mentioned earlier even they realized you cannot have a
12:46
perfectly static universe without things moving or changing. So even they had to
12:52
create what was called a quasi steadystate universe where matter was being created every so often once every
12:59
thousand years you would create a proton out of nothing. Um and it was a brilliant idea. It did make the universe
13:06
slowly start to change, but there was no big bang. It was always existing. It was
13:11
smaller yesterday, but it it existed forever and it's so big that even if you extrapolated back by a large amount, it
13:18
would still be finite in size. So, in that case, their theory was one to match
13:23
the data. And so, I give them credit for that. Um, that's been falsified many
13:28
times over by many different types of astronomy observations. [snorts] Um there another model where the
13:35
universe comes from what's called a big crunch that the universe existed be there was a universe just like our sun
13:42
in this part of our galaxy. Our galaxy is about uh 10 8 to 10 billion years
13:48
old. Our sun is only about uh 4 billion five four and a half billion years old.
13:53
So um I have here in my pocket a meteorite uh which you know I will I I
14:01
do give out here's an actual meteorite. So our sun and the earth came from something that look like this. This was
14:08
a meteorite. It's very heavy. [snorts] It's made of iron and cobalt
and nickel. It's highly magnetic. I do give them away on my website. Most of the time you have to live in the United
14:18
States but see see the website for more details. This object was created not
14:24
from the earth was not created from the earth, right? It was created from something else that blew up many
14:30
hundreds of millions or billions of years before our sun was formed. So too,
14:35
our sun formed in the galaxy. And our universe could have formed from another
14:40
universe in what's called the big crunch. In other words, instead of making a supernova explosion that produces iron, you have a universe that
14:47
collapses, explodes like the supernova does, but creates a universe. Um, and so
14:52
there's different models that suggest that can happen. There are some that produce a singularity, which is a point
14:58
of infinite test, infinite gravity over infinite decimal size, uh, much like a black hole. And there are some that
15:05
don't produce singularities. And the ones that don't produce singularities will not produce the waves of gravity
15:10
that we're trying to see with the Simon's Observatory. Therefore, if we do see those waves, it falsifies the big
15:17
crunch hypothesis. Remember I said I can't prove it, but I can falsify it. So, you can disprove these other
15:23
scenarios. Static universe, um, steady state universe, and the big crunch universe and the what's called the
15:29
bouncing cosmological model. You can falsify them. You can't prove them, but you can falsify them. So scientists have
15:36
to be creative and so yes there are other different types of universes that can emerge from non- big bangs and those
15:43
are some of them. Yes, science should always stay open to new ideas and ready to question old ones
Is the Universe Expanding?
15:49
but when it comes to the basics can we say with high confidence that the universe will keep expanding. a very
15:55
vast amount of data of hard evidence that the universe is expanding has been
16:02
expanding and will continue to expand for some time. Uh we don't know the ultimate destination of the expansion.
16:09
Will it continue forever? Will it stop? Will our universe eventually reach a maximum expansion and then collapse?
16:17
That is a possibility. We can say with extreme confidence that the universe has
16:22
been expanding for approximately 13.8 billion years. That expansion rate is
16:28
measured using a variety of different tools, techniques, simulations, many
16:33
different tools from thousands of different data points, perhaps at this point a million different pieces of data
16:38
all confirm the universe is expanding. It's one of the most accurate known scientific facts. You know, it used to
16:44
be when you looked at Wikipedia, which is not a great scientific reference, but if you looked up science,
16:50
okay, you just typed in science, it showed you a picture of the Big Bang theory. In other words, it could be
16:56
anything, right? It could be biology, it could be um some some aspect of of
17:01
engineering or whatever it had bang. Now, that's humorous to me because when
17:08
I started in graduate school 30 years ago, we didn't know if the age of the universe was 10 billion years old or 20
17:13
billion years old. We knew there were things in the universe that were, you know, older than than what we thought
17:19
the earth, the age of the earth, etc. Now, we know that age down to a few
17:24
decimal places. And that's all happened thanks to hard data that my colleagues and I have produced over just the last
30 years. And if you had told somebody this a 100 years ago when Einstein,
17:36
Hubble, Lummetra, Gamov, all these people were working on the big bang theory, they would have laughed at you.
17:42
They would have said, "This is philosophy. You'll never have data." But now we have data. And so we all agree
17:48
the universe is expanding. It's a very fringe and not accepted uh opinion to
17:53
say the universe is not expanding. There's almost no there's zero evidence for it effectively. Okay. So right now we're sure that the
Will We Disappear? Could the Universe Collapse?
18:00
universe is expanding but is it possible that one day it could start shrinking
18:06
and everything could disappear? Uh probably not in a couple of days. So
18:13
yes, keep paying your taxes. But uh but in a few billions of years, you know, to a cosmologist, days, years, month, they
18:21
mean nothing. It's it's literally irrelevant. If you take the entire history of the universe and put it on a
18:27
clock and said, "What time is it now?" You know, if now is exactly at midnight, you know, human beings came about 1
18:33
second ago, right? So, it's it's it's almost completely irrelevant. A day, you know, is is basically irrelevant.
18:40
However, it is not the case that we know for sure the universe will never
18:45
collapse, deflate as you kind of are suggesting. In fact, there's evidence
18:50
recently from an instrument called the DESI, the dark energy spectroscopic instrument, which is a telescope, uh,
18:57
which measured the positions of galaxies and their dynamics and their motion through what are called barrian acoustic
19:02
oscillations and other fluctuations in their signal. And they [snorts] seem to suggest that there is a chance that the
19:10
the force that's keeping the universe to accelerate now may be decreasing and it
19:15
may eventually go away. And there's a mysterious substance that Einstein
19:20
originally proposed in 1915 called the cosmological constant. And he was a
19:27
brilliant person but I love to talk about Einstein not only because he was so smart but because he made so many
19:32
mistakes. See GL people think that scientists make no mistakes right but as
19:38
you know the word in Russian for scientist means someone who was taught right. So to be taught means you have to
19:45
know be ignorant of something right? You can't be taught if you think you know everything. And a lot of my colleagues
19:50
think they know everything. So it's hard to teach them. But let's leave that aside. When Einstein came up with this
19:56
idea, he was going on data. The data were that we lived in a galaxy. We didn't know if there were any other
20:02
galaxies in 1915. We thought the Milky Way was the whole universe. And he saw that there were no motion of the distant
20:09
stars and distant other objects called nebula, but we now call them galaxies. And he saw they weren't moving towards
20:15
us or away from us. Therefore, he concluded the universe is static. But wait a second. Newton, who was
20:22
Einstein's hero. Okay. Newton said everything in the universe attracts
20:27
themselves according to the mass and the distance between them squared. One over the the distance squared. So you and I
20:34
separate across the table. We're separated by so many feet. That feet. If we double the the distance and you go
20:40
farther away, that goes down by one quarter. But it's still attractive. Gravity is only attractive. If you
20:47
sprinkle matter throughout the universe, eventually it will collapse. So, it cannot be stable to have a universe
20:54
that's static unless there's it'll be like balancing a pencil on its tip
21:00
forever. So, Newton knew that was impossible. Certainly, Einstein knew that was impossible. So, he said, "Hm,
21:07
my laws of general relativity are incomplete. I [snorts] have to add [clears throat] some energy at every
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