248: Brian Keating | Losing the Nobel Prize - Perils of idolization

Jul 2, 2019 · 51m 23s
248: Brian Keating | Losing the Nobel Prize - Perils of idolization
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Brian Keating is a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. He has lectured on six of the seven continents, including Antarctica. He is an expert in...

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Brian Keating is a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. He has lectured on six of the seven continents, including Antarctica. He is an expert in the study of the universe's oldest light, the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which he uses to investigate the origin and evolution of the universe. Keating is a pioneer in the search for the earliest physical evidence of the inflationary epoch, the theorized period of expansion of space in the early universe directly after the Big Bang. Physicists predict that this evidence will reveal itself as a particular pattern in the way CMB light is polarized; this pattern is referred to as a B-mode pattern, and Keating designed the first experiment dedicated to detecting it (BICEP). In 2014, amidst the purported detection of this long-sought signal, Keating was busy co-teaching a course at UC San Diego entitled "Poetry for Physicists", with Pulitzer Prizewinner Rae Armantrout.

A Forbes, Physics Today, Science News, and Science Friday Best Science Book Of 2018

The inside story of a quest to unlock one of cosmology’s biggest mysteries, derailed by the lure of the Nobel Prize.

What would it have been like to be an eyewitness to the Big Bang? In 2014, astronomers wielding BICEP2, the most powerful cosmology telescope ever made, revealed that they’d glimpsed the spark that ignited the Big Bang. Millions around the world tuned in to the announcement broadcast live from Harvard University, immediately igniting rumors of an imminent Nobel Prize. But had these cosmologists truly read the cosmic prologue or, swept up in Nobel dreams, had they been deceived by a galactic mirage?

In Losing the Nobel Prize, cosmologist and inventor of the BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) experiment Brian Keating tells the inside story of BICEP2’s mesmerizing discovery and the scientific drama that ensued. In an adventure story that spans the globe from Rhode Island to the South Pole, from California to Chile, Keating takes us on a personal journey of revelation and discovery, bringing to vivid life the highly competitive, take-no-prisoners, publish-or-perish world of modern science. Along the way, he provocatively argues that the Nobel Prize, instead of advancing scientific progress, may actually hamper it, encouraging speed and greed while punishing collaboration and bold innovation. In a thoughtful reappraisal of the wishes of Alfred Nobel, Keating offers practical solutions for reforming the prize, providing a vision of a scientific future in which cosmologists may, finally, be able to see all the way back to the very beginning.

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