Nobel Prize winners alive: ~200
At any given time, only about 200 people alive on Earth hold a Nobel Prize, representing a tiny fraction of humanity's 8 billion people.
Snapshot · The Shawn Ryan Show
#316 Brian Keating - The First Object Ever Found From Another Solar System
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Jun 25, 2026
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Brian Keating's Personal Story: Abandonment, Identity, and the Nobel Quest
At 2:09:05 · chapter starts 1:52:00
This chapter is the emotional core of the episode. Keating discloses that his biological father — a brilliant physicist — abandoned him and his brother when they were 7 and 10 years old, choosing to waive child support rather than pay alimony, thereby surrendering them to adoption by his stepfather, Vietnam veteran Ray Keating. Brian changed his name, was raised Catholic, became an altar boy, wanted to be a priest, then discovered girls and science. He taught himself calculus autodidactically in rural upstate New York with no internet. He then describes the eerie quantum-entanglement quality of reconnecting with his father in graduate school and discovering they had independently pursued identical research in quantum mechanics and cosmology — a genetic ghost influencing him from 16 years of absence. His father died at 69, but in the intervening years Keating was motivated in part by what he calls 'prideful regret' — he wanted to win the Nobel Prize to make his father feel the full weight of having given him up. [1] — Brian Keating "Brian Keating's birth father abandoned him at age 7, choosing to waive child support rather than stay in his sons' lives. When Keating reco…" 1:52:00
Brian Keating's Abandoned Father and the Drive for a Nobel Prize
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.
The Big Bang, Cosmic Microwave Background, and What Happened the Day Before
The cosmic microwave background is the leftover heat from nuclear fusion at the universe's birth — still detectable today. To find it, you need to go where there's no water: Antarctica or the Atacama Desert. Brian Keating dedicated his career to capturing its faintest signal to answer humanity's oldest question: what happened before the Big Bang?
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