Podbit · The Shawn Ryan Show
Brian Keating's birth father abandoned him at age 7, choosing to waive child support rather than stay in his sons' lives. When Keating reconnected with him in graduate school and discovered they had independently pursued identical physics research, he set a singular goal: win the Nobel Prize his father never could. Partly for science. Partly for revenge.
Where this was said
At 1:52:00 · chapter starts 1:18:35
Keating answers what may be the deepest question in science: what happened before the Big Bang? He explains that the cosmic microwave background is the leftover heat of nuclear fusion at the universe's birth, still filling all of space as microwaves. To detect it without interference from atmospheric water vapor — which absorbs microwaves the way a microwave oven heats food — you need to go to Antarctica or Chile's Atacama Desert at 17,000 feet altitude. He describes four competing pre-Big Bang theories: Stephen Hawking's 'there is no before' (the South Pole analogy — you can't go south from the South Pole); the Big Crunch/Big Bang cycle; string theory's colliding membranes; and the multiverse. He notes that the Genesis model — a single, specific beginning of time — is the only one that sounds like 'In the beginning,' and that it's the only one with a falsifiable scientific signature: primordial gravitational waves detectable in the CMB. [1] — Brian Keating "The cosmic microwave background is the leftover heat from nuclear fusion at the universe's birth — still detectable today. To find it, you …" 2:13:10
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