Name: Cosmologist Brian Keating on The Fascinating Life and Discoveries of Galileo
Uploaded: 2023-08-22T17:26:02.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Cosmologist Brian Keating on The Fascinating Life and Discoveries of Galileo' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-08-22. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Cosmologist Brian Keating on The Fascinating Life and Discoveries of Galileo' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-08-22. Transcript available.

The Joe Rogan Experience
I made a video once I said this is the best Christmas gift you could possibly
get a kid
because with it you can see the same craters on the moon that Galileo saw.
Light pollution does not obscure the, you know, the planets.
Light pollution does not make impossible, I'm not advocating for light
pollution,
but I'm just saying right here in the middle of Austin or in the middle of San
Diego
I can see the exact same things that caused Galileo to realize that the sun is
the center of the solar system.
Using scientific reasoning and evidence based on observation.
How good are the telescopes, like say if you wanted to look at Jupiter, how
much can you see?
You can see a lot, what you can see...
You can see the shape?
You can see the shape that it's a planet.
Do you know what the word planet means or where it derives from?
No.
So I love etymology, and stop me if I'm nerding out too much, but planet means
wanderer in Greek.
Wanderer. What is it wandering against? The fixed stars.
So the fact that you have names for things, you know, I always think it's funny,
like I'm Jewish,
and we have a name for people that aren't Jewish, Goyim.
It's not an insult, it just means non-Jewish, it means nation.
Right.
Actually, Israel is a Goy, which is a nation.
But we have, like, but we're 0.2% of the world's population, like what the hell?
Why are you making up names for, they should make names for you, right?
Right.
But we have names as astronomers.
There were only five things they could see that would move in space, and those
were the planets from Mercury, Venus.
Obviously, they could see Mars and Jupiter and Saturn.
But they couldn't see anything else, so they named those things the wanderers,
and they wandered against the fixed stars.
Now we know the stars do move, and actually the whole galaxy moves, and
potentially we'll get to this maybe later.
And maybe the universe, in some sense, could be said to be moving in a vaster
landscape called the multiverse, which we can get to at a certain point.
But the planets, you can see them.
But what's so important is what Galileo saw.
Jamie, if you could show this, it would be amazing.
Galileo, in the winter of 1610, in northern Italy, where he was living, he used
a telescope not any better than this.
In fact, this might be better because the glass is better, even though it's a
Chinese piece of junk, you know, that I bought on eBay.
But he mapped -- he was able to measure Jupiter and see it, and hopefully we
can see it on the screen.
And he saw it as a disk.
So if you want to see planets, you can differentiate them right now by the fact
that they do not scintillate.
They do not sparkle.
They do not twinkle, twinkle like stars do because they're extended objects
that we can actually, you know, see through the same and different parts of the
atmospheric column.
They also cause a scintillation, you know, like a sniper rifle.
They correct for it.
They use what's called adaptive optics.
That's to avoid, like, the thermal radiation from the Earth.
Like, you're shooting something or an elk or whatever at great distance.
There's thermal radiation close to the ground, and then the air is much cooler.
And so you get these boundary layers of the atmosphere that causes differential
refraction, which changes the color and the position of where the deer is.
And that's not good, right?
So they have to correct for that using what's called adaptive optics.
Anyway, but the same phenomena happens for the planets.
They're so big, they're so close to us.
They're not bigger than the stars.
Stars are massively bigger than any of our planets, including Jupiter, the
biggest planet in the solar system.
But because they're close to us, they don't appear to be points, and only
points will twinkle.
So if you want to identify a star versus a plane versus a planet, the planet
will be the thing that doesn't move and doesn't twinkle.
That's called scintillation.
They do not scintillate the same way that stars do.
So what Galileo did in January of 1610 is he made a series of observations of
the planet Jupiter.
He knew exactly where it was.
He also invented the tripod.
He was the first person.
These things that we just take for granted, like, Joe, do you know that they
didn't have clocks back then?
There was no clock.
They couldn't measure time.
They had sundials, right?
They had sundials, but what are you going to do at night?
Well, it was the first clock.
So Galileo tried to invent the first clock.
Really?
It was actually part of a precursor to the Nobel Prize.
It was something called the Longitude Prize.
Oh.
They offered a prize.
I don't know if you've ever done any boating or whatever, but when you're out
on the ocean, it's extremely hard to determine what your longitude is.
It's easy to find your latitude.
You just look for Polaris, the North Star.
You measure your elevation, and that's going to complement where you are latitudinally
on the axis going from South Pole to North Pole on the Earth.
But it was impossible to tell where you are east to west from the prime meridian
unless you had an accurate way of measuring time.
So Galileo was one of the first people to try to compete to win this prize,
which was worth, you know, like a million dollars back then in those days.
And he tried a couple different ways to invent time pieces.
But the one that he tried to settle on was this use of the planet Jupiter's
moons.
Jupiter has four moons.
I came for that look, Joe.
I came for that look.
Wow.
I can die happy.
I got the look.
Wow.
Jupiter has four moons.
And you can see them with this telescope.
And I'm going to give this as a gift to you for your birthday.
That little tiny one?
You can see it.
Yeah.
If Jupiter's out and you know where to look and you kind of use a little bit of
creative.
How much power is that one?
This one's about 12, 15 power.
So you could do it with 15 binoculars?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You'll see what you'll see.
On the tripod?
These four moons.
But I wonder if, Jamie, if you could find.
Trying to find something that wasn't great.
If you look up Starry Messenger, Galileo sketch Jupiter.
So what Galileo did is he turned the telescope to the moon in 1609.
And then in 1610, there they are, Jamie, on the right with those stars.
Look at that illustration of Galileo.
That's his handwritten.
I've seen a friend of mine owns this copy, a first edition of these books.
And you're looking at it and actually it's-
A first edition?
The actual copy that he wrote on?
Not only that.
Yeah.
The first edition, but it has his handwriting on it in pencil.
Whoa.
It's insane.
Oh my God.
That's gotta be worth a billion dollars.
Oh, it's-
Jamie, could you please go back to that?
Yeah.
Those illustrations?
I had that.
This thing, I think.
That's the handwritten stuff?
Yeah.
Oh wow.
I couldn't tell what this was.
That's why I didn't want to bring it up.
Imagine having a piece of paper that that guy wrote on.
Imagine it.
Yeah, so this is a depiction of him showing, so Galileo's the guy with the
beard looking
down, like Andrew Huberman, at the guy with the-
He does look like Andrew Huberman.
Yeah, doesn't he?
Look at that beautiful chiseled beard.
That's right.
Muscular.
So he's showing these Venetian senators in Doha, because they were in charge of
the military
budget.
So even back then, there was a scientific military connection that he realized,
because Galileo
was kind of a cad.
He had a bunch of mistresses.
He had some illegitimate children.
How dare you, Galileo?
He had a support.
How dare you not be pure?
He had to support his brother, who's kind of a no good Nick.
But anyway, the sketches in the lower right show the planet as you will see it
with this
telescope on it.
I'll let you know when it comes out.
And those four little dots, there was an image a couple of pages back, Jamie,
that showed
the planet as a disk, and then there are four stars, and if you go back one, I'll
point
it out to you.
Yeah, see that thing in the lower right, Jamie?
It's a Pinterest thing.
I don't know if that's a bad-
Yeah, click on that.
So here's a couple of- See, it says January- It's hard to see.
It's January 1610, that's Galileo's handwriting, and Ionis is like Jupiter,
okay?
He had shit handwriting.
Oh, I know.
Yeah.
I always thought people back then just wrote perfectly with feathers.
Who knew how to read it?
That's right.
That's a good point.
That's a very good point.
He's got like a doctor's handwriting.
Exactly.
So this is his first major book, and in the upper left, you see the sketch of
the moon
with these giant craters on it.
Over there, Jamie?
Yeah, click on it.
So click on that, Jamie.
Is that a sketch?
That's his sketch of the moon through this telescope, essentially, okay?
Now the interesting thing is, see that big crater?
That doesn't exist.
Really?
That does not exist.
The one on the top?
No, the one on the bottom.
That one.
Doesn't exist?
Does not exist.
Now, why is it there?
He was a smart guy.
He was an artist, too, by the way.
His father, Vincenzo, was a beautiful musician, a well-known musician.
He was a sketch.
I mean, that's hand-drawn.
Why did he put that there?
The Higgs-Joe.
He wanted to convey not only what it looked like, but how it felt.
Hmm.
He was conveying.
And when you see it, you'll feel like it's like that big, but if you actually
measure
it, it's about 10 times smaller than that.
Oh, so he just made it larger than it really is.
Oh, yes.
To emphasize it.
And what's so cool about that, if you want to know, you've had on, like, my
friend Sean
Carroll, he talked about the Higgs boson when he was on the first time.
If you want to feel what it was like to discover the Higgs boson, you need 10
to 20 billion euros,
and you need a large Hadron Collider.
Okay.
Good luck.
I don't know if Spotify is going to hook you up there.
But the feeling that Galileo had, you can have that tonight.
You can feel what it's like to see things for the first time in human history
because it's
your own history.
You're experiencing it for the first time.
There's no other scientific tool, nothing.
Even the microscope, it's not the same viscerally.
You will be connected to Galileo 400 years ago feeling he was terrified.
When he saw those pictures of those dots, he realized what he was looking at
was not just
like some stars that happened to be next to Jupiter.
He realized he discovered another solar system, a system in which there was a
massive gravitating
object, Jupiter, and around it were orbiting satellites, were orbiting moons
around it.
Today they're called the Galilean satellites.
He actually named them after his benefactor, those patrons, the Medicis, who
were the richest,
you know, people in that part of Northern Italy.
So he named, he was clever, right?
He was trying to curry favor.
Sure.
Maybe this, it would be like if we named the, you know, whatever, the Higgs boson,
we named
that after, you know, the European, you know, equivalent of the IRS, right?
Right.
He was kind of a kiss hand, a kiss up, you know, in some ways, sycophant.
But it had to save his life and he needed money and so forth.
Right.
And he drew that.
He realized the, wait a second, the Bible and all teaching heretofore said
there is only
one center to the solar system and it's the earth, not the sun.
This is called geocentrism.
Everybody believed that, Aristotle or Plato.
Everybody had believed that for a long time because it said it was natural that
heavy things
should fall towards a center.
And the center that everything seemed to fall towards was the center of the
earth or the earth
itself.
Therefore, the earth must be the center of the universe.
Remember the solar system was the universe for a long time.
Then for an equally long time, almost the galaxy was the whole universe.
And now there's the universe and maybe the multiverse that we'll talk about.
So this was just incredible realization to him.
Imagine like you come upon this thing and you realize you're the first person
in human
history ever to feel that.
Is there any documentation of his struggle with trying to convey these ideas to
people
that had very strong religious beliefs?
Yeah.
Because obviously it turned out to be a catastrophe for him.
That's right.
But what did he, did he convey in his writing the frustration that he had?
He was, he's such a fascinating person.
I always make a provocative statement that like, we don't need English
departments.
We should just teach like physics and astronomy, because some of the great
scientists of history,
men and women were tremendous orders.
They were tremendous writers and they could convey things through the written
word that
was pure artistry and mastery.
And Galileo would say things like, I do not believe that the same God who has
given us
senses to understand the world would require that we not use that.
I'm butchering the quote, not use them in order to better understand it.
He would write things that he had discovered things, you know, only as a way to
open a portal
into the universe such that minds more astute than mine may be able to walk
through this
portal.
And he was being a little falsely humble.
But Newton was the same way.
Newton would write as a great order.
So you can learn a lot from scientific writing.
So therefore, if you only had to choose one thing, I would take the books of
Galileo.
And this geocentric version of the universe that they've, how is it written in
the Bible?
Like, how do they describe?
It's actually, you know, the atheist, so I call myself a practicing agnostic,
which I can
define later if you like.
But you had on my friend Steven C. Meyer, which is partially the reason that I'm
here, I think.
But to have the discussion about, you know, the influence of religion on
science.
And he made the claim that without religion, we wouldn't have science on the
show a couple
of weeks ago.
In other words, we wouldn't have the tradition that we can, that the world is
intelligible.
It's not the capricious will of gods, you know, playing with human beings as
Greeks and
others had identified.
So the notion of, you know, how religious a scientist could be or how religion
impacted
him was very clear.
He would say he was a very religious person.
In fact, two of his daughters were nuns and because of his, you know, I always
say like,
imagine we're living in a time where someone like Anthony Fauci or, you know,
Francis Collins
or somebody that they had, they were not only the scientists, the expert
scientists say,
but they also control the government.
In other words, the most powerful force on earth at that time, at least where
Galileo
was, was the Vatican.
He never left Italy.
He never left.
Italy didn't exist back then, by the way.
They were only city states, right, Tuscany and Venice and Rome and so forth.
But the notion, it was a Catholic, you know, band of jurisdiction and Catholic
church had
sway over that part of Italy and Tuscany where he was.
He was very religious, but he thought that he could say things like if he
proved that something
scientifically was true.
He didn't understand why that couldn't be part of the religious canon.
So he was surprised.
In other words, he felt that the signature of God is truth.
So if he discovered truth, it wouldn't be a problem for the, it wouldn't be
threatened.
But I argue back then it was kind of threatening.
Like if you started having a bunch of people say, oh, the Bible's wrong.
We've been misled.
Even though the government, not just scientific authority, they're the
government, it could
lead, I'm not saying it's good, but it could lead them to want to suppress that,
right?
Because it could lead to insurrections.
It could lead to whatever and rebellions.
And that could be perceived as very threatening to the state.

Cosmologist Brian Keating on The Fascinating Life and Discoveries of Galileo

The Joe Rogan Experience
I made a video once I said this is the best Christmas gift you could possibly
get a kid
because with it you can see the same craters on the moon that Galileo saw.
Light pollution does not obscure the, you know, the planets.
Light pollution does not make impossible, I'm not advocating for light
pollution,
but I'm just saying right here in the middle of Austin or in the middle of San
Diego
I can see the exact same things that caused Galileo to realize that the sun is
the center of the solar system.
Using scientific reasoning and evidence based on observation.
How good are the telescopes, like say if you wanted to look at Jupiter, how
much can you see?
You can see a lot, what you can see...
You can see the shape?
You can see the shape that it's a planet.
Do you know what the word planet means or where it derives from?
No.
So I love etymology, and stop me if I'm nerding out too much, but planet means
wanderer in Greek.
Wanderer. What is it wandering against? The fixed stars.
So the fact that you have names for things, you know, I always think it's funny,
like I'm Jewish,
and we have a name for people that aren't Jewish, Goyim.
It's not an insult, it just means non-Jewish, it means nation.
Right.
Actually, Israel is a Goy, which is a nation.
But we have, like, but we're 0.2% of the world's population, like what the hell?
Why are you making up names for, they should make names for you, right?
Right.
But we have names as astronomers.
There were only five things they could see that would move in space, and those
were the planets from Mercury, Venus.
Obviously, they could see Mars and Jupiter and Saturn.
But they couldn't see anything else, so they named those things the wanderers,
and they wandered against the fixed stars.
Now we know the stars do move, and actually the whole galaxy moves, and
potentially we'll get to this maybe later.
And maybe the universe, in some sense, could be said to be moving in a vaster
landscape called the multiverse, which we can get to at a certain point.
But the planets, you can see them.
But what's so important is what Galileo saw.
Jamie, if you could show this, it would be amazing.
Galileo, in the winter of 1610, in northern Italy, where he was living, he used
a telescope not any better than this.
In fact, this might be better because the glass is better, even though it's a
Chinese piece of junk, you know, that I bought on eBay.
But he mapped -- he was able to measure Jupiter and see it, and hopefully we
can see it on the screen.
And he saw it as a disk.
So if you want to see planets, you can differentiate them right now by the fact
that they do not scintillate.
They do not sparkle.
They do not twinkle, twinkle like stars do because they're extended objects
that we can actually, you know, see through the same and different parts of the
atmospheric column.
They also cause a scintillation, you know, like a sniper rifle.
They correct for it.
They use what's called adaptive optics.
That's to avoid, like, the thermal radiation from the Earth.
Like, you're shooting something or an elk or whatever at great distance.
There's thermal radiation close to the ground, and then the air is much cooler.
And so you get these boundary layers of the atmosphere that causes differential
refraction, which changes the color and the position of where the deer is.
And that's not good, right?
So they have to correct for that using what's called adaptive optics.
Anyway, but the same phenomena happens for the planets.
They're so big, they're so close to us.
They're not bigger than the stars.
Stars are massively bigger than any of our planets, including Jupiter, the
biggest planet in the solar system.
But because they're close to us, they don't appear to be points, and only
points will twinkle.
So if you want to identify a star versus a plane versus a planet, the planet
will be the thing that doesn't move and doesn't twinkle.
That's called scintillation.
They do not scintillate the same way that stars do.
So what Galileo did in January of 1610 is he made a series of observations of
the planet Jupiter.
He knew exactly where it was.
He also invented the tripod.
He was the first person.
These things that we just take for granted, like, Joe, do you know that they
didn't have clocks back then?
There was no clock.
They couldn't measure time.
They had sundials, right?
They had sundials, but what are you going to do at night?
Well, it was the first clock.
So Galileo tried to invent the first clock.
Really?
It was actually part of a precursor to the Nobel Prize.
It was something called the Longitude Prize.
Oh.
They offered a prize.
I don't know if you've ever done any boating or whatever, but when you're out
on the ocean, it's extremely hard to determine what your longitude is.
It's easy to find your latitude.
You just look for Polaris, the North Star.
You measure your elevation, and that's going to complement where you are latitudinally
on the axis going from South Pole to North Pole on the Earth.
But it was impossible to tell where you are east to west from the prime meridian
unless you had an accurate way of measuring time.
So Galileo was one of the first people to try to compete to win this prize,
which was worth, you know, like a million dollars back then in those days.
And he tried a couple different ways to invent time pieces.
But the one that he tried to settle on was this use of the planet Jupiter's
moons.
Jupiter has four moons.
I came for that look, Joe.
I came for that look.
Wow.
I can die happy.
I got the look.
Wow.
Jupiter has four moons.
And you can see them with this telescope.
And I'm going to give this as a gift to you for your birthday.
That little tiny one?
You can see it.
Yeah.
If Jupiter's out and you know where to look and you kind of use a little bit of
creative.
How much power is that one?
This one's about 12, 15 power.
So you could do it with 15 binoculars?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You'll see what you'll see.
On the tripod?
These four moons.
But I wonder if, Jamie, if you could find.
Trying to find something that wasn't great.
If you look up Starry Messenger, Galileo sketch Jupiter.
So what Galileo did is he turned the telescope to the moon in 1609.
And then in 1610, there they are, Jamie, on the right with those stars.
Look at that illustration of Galileo.
That's his handwritten.
I've seen a friend of mine owns this copy, a first edition of these books.
And you're looking at it and actually it's-
A first edition?
The actual copy that he wrote on?
Not only that.
Yeah.
The first edition, but it has his handwriting on it in pencil.
Whoa.
It's insane.
Oh my God.
That's gotta be worth a billion dollars.
Oh, it's-
Jamie, could you please go back to that?
Yeah.
Those illustrations?
I had that.
This thing, I think.
That's the handwritten stuff?
Yeah.
Oh wow.
I couldn't tell what this was.
That's why I didn't want to bring it up.
Imagine having a piece of paper that that guy wrote on.
Imagine it.
Yeah, so this is a depiction of him showing, so Galileo's the guy with the
beard looking
down, like Andrew Huberman, at the guy with the-
He does look like Andrew Huberman.
Yeah, doesn't he?
Look at that beautiful chiseled beard.
That's right.
Muscular.
So he's showing these Venetian senators in Doha, because they were in charge of
the military
budget.
So even back then, there was a scientific military connection that he realized,
because Galileo
was kind of a cad.
He had a bunch of mistresses.
He had some illegitimate children.
How dare you, Galileo?
He had a support.
How dare you not be pure?
He had to support his brother, who's kind of a no good Nick.
But anyway, the sketches in the lower right show the planet as you will see it
with this
telescope on it.
I'll let you know when it comes out.
And those four little dots, there was an image a couple of pages back, Jamie,
that showed
the planet as a disk, and then there are four stars, and if you go back one, I'll
point
it out to you.
Yeah, see that thing in the lower right, Jamie?
It's a Pinterest thing.
I don't know if that's a bad-
Yeah, click on that.
So here's a couple of- See, it says January- It's hard to see.
It's January 1610, that's Galileo's handwriting, and Ionis is like Jupiter,
okay?
He had shit handwriting.
Oh, I know.
Yeah.
I always thought people back then just wrote perfectly with feathers.
Who knew how to read it?
That's right.
That's a good point.
That's a very good point.
He's got like a doctor's handwriting.
Exactly.
So this is his first major book, and in the upper left, you see the sketch of
the moon
with these giant craters on it.
Over there, Jamie?
Yeah, click on it.
So click on that, Jamie.
Is that a sketch?
That's his sketch of the moon through this telescope, essentially, okay?
Now the interesting thing is, see that big crater?
That doesn't exist.
Really?
That does not exist.
The one on the top?
No, the one on the bottom.
That one.
Doesn't exist?
Does not exist.
Now, why is it there?
He was a smart guy.
He was an artist, too, by the way.
His father, Vincenzo, was a beautiful musician, a well-known musician.
He was a sketch.
I mean, that's hand-drawn.
Why did he put that there?
The Higgs-Joe.
He wanted to convey not only what it looked like, but how it felt.
Hmm.
He was conveying.
And when you see it, you'll feel like it's like that big, but if you actually
measure
it, it's about 10 times smaller than that.
Oh, so he just made it larger than it really is.
Oh, yes.
To emphasize it.
And what's so cool about that, if you want to know, you've had on, like, my
friend Sean
Carroll, he talked about the Higgs boson when he was on the first time.
If you want to feel what it was like to discover the Higgs boson, you need 10
to 20 billion euros,
and you need a large Hadron Collider.
Okay.
Good luck.
I don't know if Spotify is going to hook you up there.
But the feeling that Galileo had, you can have that tonight.
You can feel what it's like to see things for the first time in human history
because it's
your own history.
You're experiencing it for the first time.
There's no other scientific tool, nothing.
Even the microscope, it's not the same viscerally.
You will be connected to Galileo 400 years ago feeling he was terrified.
When he saw those pictures of those dots, he realized what he was looking at
was not just
like some stars that happened to be next to Jupiter.
He realized he discovered another solar system, a system in which there was a
massive gravitating
object, Jupiter, and around it were orbiting satellites, were orbiting moons
around it.
Today they're called the Galilean satellites.
He actually named them after his benefactor, those patrons, the Medicis, who
were the richest,
you know, people in that part of Northern Italy.
So he named, he was clever, right?
He was trying to curry favor.
Sure.
Maybe this, it would be like if we named the, you know, whatever, the Higgs boson,
we named
that after, you know, the European, you know, equivalent of the IRS, right?
Right.
He was kind of a kiss hand, a kiss up, you know, in some ways, sycophant.
But it had to save his life and he needed money and so forth.
Right.
And he drew that.
He realized the, wait a second, the Bible and all teaching heretofore said
there is only
one center to the solar system and it's the earth, not the sun.
This is called geocentrism.
Everybody believed that, Aristotle or Plato.
Everybody had believed that for a long time because it said it was natural that
heavy things
should fall towards a center.
And the center that everything seemed to fall towards was the center of the
earth or the earth
itself.
Therefore, the earth must be the center of the universe.
Remember the solar system was the universe for a long time.
Then for an equally long time, almost the galaxy was the whole universe.
And now there's the universe and maybe the multiverse that we'll talk about.
So this was just incredible realization to him.
Imagine like you come upon this thing and you realize you're the first person
in human
history ever to feel that