Before the Big Bang: God, Alien Life & The Operating System of Reality | Dr. Brian Keating

Summary

Mayim Bialik's Breakdown

Episode: Before the Big Bang: God, Alien Life & The Operating System of Reality | Dr. Brian Keating

Date: June 9, 2026
Guests: Dr. Brian Keating (Experimental Cosmologist, Author, Professor at UCSD)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into some of humanity’s biggest mysteries with physicist Dr. Brian Keating—known for championing experimental evidence over pure theory. Together with hosts Mayim Bialik and Jonathan Cohen, Dr. Keating explores what came before the Big Bang, the intersections of faith and science, the search for life beyond Earth, and philosophical questions around consciousness and reality’s “operating system.” The conversation moves seamlessly between cosmology, religion, near-death experiences, and the limits of scientific proof, with a playful and intellectually rigorous tone.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Mission of a Public Scientist

[03:27] Dr. Brian Keating:

• Dr. Keating’s passion lies in making the public aware of what experimental physicists do, especially compared to theoretical physicists often seen in the media (e.g., Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku).
• “My job is not to prove people right at all. People always say, what do you hope to find? Whose theory do you have? I don't—I hope they all fail because the more interesting things are learned the more that we collect data.”
  (Keating, 04:10)
• Emphasizes: Experimental evidence moves science forward, not just theoretical speculation.
• Advocates for scientists to communicate with the public, even against academic culture that sometimes frowns upon outreach.

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2. Keating’s Personal Journey: From Childhood Awe to Cutting-Edge Cosmology

[08:29] Dr. Brian Keating:

• Deep childhood curiosity about astronomy (“the moon was following me”), leading to a passion for telescopes as windows into the universe.
• “It was like impossible to think someone's going to pay me to use a telescope—it's like would you like a job as an ice cream taster... this is crazy.”
  (Keating, 09:49)
• Turning points: First telescope (with a “loan” from his mother), eventually leading to work on massive observatories like the Simons Observatory.
• Sees telescopes as time machines:
  “As we look back in space we’re looking back in time—that’s why the sun could, God forbid, disappear right now, we wouldn’t know it for eight more minutes.”
  (Keating, 10:41)

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3. What Are We Actually Trying to Find? The CMB and Cosmic Time Travel

[11:40] Dr. Brian Keating:

• Describes two main research areas:
  • Using visible light to look for symmetry violations (potential to disprove Einstein’s relativity).
  • Primary focus: Studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB)—the oldest detectable light, the universe’s afterglow.
• “What I love is the hardcore grounding that we can sample the physical conditions of the early universe from a distance of forty-five billion light years away.”
  (Keating, 13:12)

The Properties of Light

[17:26] Dr. Brian Keating:

• Explains intensity, color (wavelength), and polarization of light, with polarization being critical for measuring properties of the early universe.

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4. What Came Before the Big Bang? Cosmology, Time, and Spiritual Parallels

[25:06] Jonathan Cohen, [26:04] Dr. Brian Keating:

• Big Bang is not necessarily the beginning—science opens to the possibility of prior universes.
• “Stephen Hawking said asking what happened before the Big Bang is like asking, what’s north of the North Pole. But we all know what’s north of Santa.”
  (Keating, 26:14)
• The analogy: If time began with the Big Bang, “what happened the day before?” may not make sense—unless time itself has origins.

The Arrow of Time & The Physical Universe

[29:02] Dr. Brian Keating:

• Explains the arrow of time through thermodynamics: you can’t “un-mix” coffee and cream.
• Considers whether our universe is the result of a “preceding universe that collapsed… and became our existing universe.”
  (Keating, 29:39)

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5. Proof, Evidence, and Faith in Science

[30:53] Dr. Brian Keating:

• Differentiates between mathematical proof and scientific evidence: “Physics, there’s no such thing as a proof… in reality we can’t prove a physical fact. Actually, the Earth isn't perfectly spherical… It’s changing, it’s dynamic—there are no facts in science but what you can do is you can falsify things.”
  (Keating, 31:08)
• On faith and science:
  “If I had faith in something that by definition means it's not subject to scientific scrutiny. Otherwise, I could have proof.”
  (Keating, 33:07)
• Respects both atheists and believers as good scientists: “You could be a great scientist and be an atheist. Of course there have been incredible religious scientists throughout history.”
  (Keating, 33:22)

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6. Religion and Science: Two Sides, Many Journeys

[38:04] Dr. Brian Keating:

• Shares his unique background: Born Jewish, raised with exposure to Irish Catholicism, became an altar boy, later returned to Judaism.
• “Instead of having a bar mitzvah at age twelve, I was an altar boy at the church of Saint John Saint Mary... I had so much fun with it. Didn't have my bar mitzvah until I turned fifty-two.”
  (Keating, 38:38)
• Shares disenchantment with religious authorities mandating belief, and an insistence on reading the “pure text.”

On the Bible’s Relevance to Cosmology

[41:03] Dr. Brian Keating:

• Only a few verses of the Torah/Old Testament focus on creation (about 35 out of 35,000).
• “Zero point one percent of the Torah is about creation cosmology... so if you want to look at the cosmology in it, the sun and moon are created on the fourth day. [The Israelites] knew that the sun is what defines a day!”
  (Keating, 45:31)
• Suggests this order is a deliberate statement against surrounding sun-god worship, not a science manual.

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7. The Cosmological Argument, Theories of Everything, and the Many "Big Bangs"

[46:41] Dr. Brian Keating:

• Describes the popular "kalam cosmological argument" that everything that begins has a cause; thus, the universe needs a creator.
• Also notes: Each emergence—matter from energy, life from non-life, consciousness from matter—can be thought of as a kind of "big bang":
  • “We think there’s one big bang—no, no, no, there’s many big bangs... conscious emerged in a big bang—something from nothing.”
    (Keating, 46:49)

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8. Consciousness, Near Death Experiences, and the Unknown

[47:24] Jonathan Cohen:

• Raises questions about the location and nature of consciousness, referencing near-death experiences and people recounting details from outside their “dead” bodies.
• “Some people call it God, their Source. Other people will not. I always say, I don’t really care what you call it... If you drop something, it’s going to drop at 9.8 feet per second like that’s it, you know.”
  (Cohen, 49:11)

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9. Limits of Science, Theories Yet to Be Unified, and the Human Experience

[50:05] Mayim Bialik, [50:22] Dr. Brian Keating:

• Acknowledges that phenomena like dark matter, dark energy, and near-death experiences remain unresolved by science.
• Discusses the humility required—science can’t (yet) “pull together a theory of everything.”
• “First of all, we have to think about, like, this notion of belief. In addition to not looking for things I believe in as a scientist, I also feel like just as a... in common sense, like is God sitting around like, ‘wait, I hope Brian believes in me today’? Like this would make my day…”
  (Keating, 51:12)

Human Need for Meaning and Pattern, The Role of Perspective

[52:12] Dr. Brian Keating:

• Shares a Talmudic teaching: “A man should have two pockets… [one note]: ‘The whole world was created for me.’ The other: ‘I am nothing but dust and ashes.’”
• Points out that meaning-making, pattern-finding, and belief are evolved survival traits.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Confirmation Bias
  “The most dangerous words in science are not, ‘If I didn't see it, I wouldn't have believed it.’ It's, ‘If I didn't believe it, I wouldn't have seen it.’ It's called confirmation bias and it's the most pernicious, destructive force in all of science.”
  (Keating, 00:18)

• On Skepticism and Experiment
  “The most fun thing is to collect data... and prove somebody wrong. When you prove something wrong, you get a little bit closer to truth.”
  (Keating, 07:38)

• On the Arrow of Time
  “When you mix coffee and cream together, you don’t spontaneously see them break apart into two different sets of cream and coffee. So the arrow of time—did that have a starting point or did it emerge from a preceding universe that collapsed?”
  (Keating, 29:25)

• On Science and Faith
  “If I had faith in something, that by definition means it's not subject to scientific scrutiny. Otherwise, I could have proof... as a scientist, I'll choose for myself, thank you.”
  (Keating, 33:07 & 33:57)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Dr. Brian Keating’s Mission & Experimental Physics – [03:27]
• Personal Journey & Childhood Awe – [08:29]
• CMB & Looking Back in Time – [11:40], [17:26]
• What Came Before the Big Bang? – [25:06], [26:04]
• Arrow of Time & Preceding Universes – [29:02]
• On Scientific Proof & Faith – [30:53], [33:07]
• Religion, Torah & Cosmology – [38:04], [41:03]
• Cosmological Arguments & Many Big Bangs – [46:41]
• Consciousness & Near Death Experiences – [47:24]
• Limits of Scientific Knowledge – [50:05]
• Human Meaning & Pattern-Finding – [52:12]

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Flow, Tone, and Style

• Highly conversational, lively, and accessible—despite diving into complex scientific and philosophical territory.
• Mayim and Jonathan playfully ground the conversation and push for clarity, with Jonathan often providing summaries and gentle challenges.
• Dr. Keating balances technical explanations with humor, anecdotes, and humility, making advanced physics approachable and personal.
• Frequent references (and affection) for science communication, public skepticism, and pop-culture metaphors (ice cream taster, time machines, dad jokes).

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Conclusion

This episode offers a sweeping yet intimate excursion across some of science and spirituality’s most profound frontiers—accessible even for non-specialists. Dr. Keating’s candid storytelling and depth of knowledge, anchored by Mayim and Jonathan’s incisive questions, yield a powerful reminder: that true curiosity, humility, and openness to being wrong are essential for making any breakthrough—scientific or spiritual.

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Stay tuned for Part 2: Continuing with Dr. Brian Keating on NDEs, scientific tests for God’s existence, alien life, and more.

Transcript

[Dr. Brian Keating]

for the universe to come into existence it needed to have been created we think there's one big bag no no no there's many big bags god's existence should be subjected to scientific tests the highest form that you could possibly approach in science is trying to understand the operating system of reality where is consciousness the most dangerous words in science are not if i didn't see it i wouldn't have believed it it's if i didn't believe it i wouldn't have seen it it's called confirmation bias and it's the most pernicious destructive force in all

[Jonathan Cohen]

of science doctor brian keating he's an experimental cosm to discuss what came before the big bang and what is it about our universe that seems to indicate that consciousness is fundamental this meteorite found

[Dr. Brian Keating]

in northwest africa has the chemical composition of parts of mars that have been surveyed the reason i collect samples of mars and the moon is because it shows us not only is our planet active our solar system's active it's almost inconceivable that we wouldn't find some evidence of life on mars there's been recent

[Jonathan Cohen]

deaths and disappearances of scientists does it

[Dr. Brian Keating]

give you pause well that is a sign perhaps of

[Mayim Bialik]

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[Dr. Brian Keating]

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[Jonathan Cohen]

love ya so good you'll want to leave a voicemail about it sell your

[Dr. Brian Keating]

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[Jonathan Cohen]

apply hi i'm mayim bialik and i'm jonathan cohen and welcome to art breakdown today we're going to be speaking with the chancellor's distinguished professor of physics at ucsd doctor brian keating he's an experimental cosmologist doctor keating is here to discuss what came before the big bang can we prove that god exists and what is it about our universe that seems to indicate that consciousness is fundamental he's also the author of into the impossible and into the impossible two incredible conversations with nobel laureates these are fantastic books we have so much to talk about with doctor brian keating welcome to the breakdown break it down ah it's been

[Dr. Brian Keating]

a long time coming yeah we're we're

[Jonathan Cohen]

so happy to have you here you come bearing i don't know if they're gifts show and tell they are gifts

[Dr. Brian Keating]

yeah so maybe we'll get to some of them maybe we won't but these are these are you know kind of reveals okay got it we'll reveal it

[Jonathan Cohen]

there's many places we'd like to begin with you but i think we'll start with kind of letting you tell us what's sort of your mission in terms of the public part of you obviously you're a professor and a researcher what do you bring especially with your role

[Dr. Brian Keating]

writing i think you know what my goal is in terms of the public persona such as it is is to bring an experimentalist point of view to the reality of what physics is and kind of be a champion be a be a evangelist as i call it for science so to the extent that the public knows a physicist at all which is great it's michio kaku it's neil degrasse tyson it's richard feynman of the past or albert einstein right these are all theoreticians these are all people that dabble in the theoretical but they're not the ones actually building the telescopes launching them into space taking the south pole taking them to chile doing the real real stuff that we have to do to get the evidence to not prove them right but to hopefully prove them wrong my job is not to prove people right at all people always say what do you hope to find what do you hope to do whose theory do you have i don't hope they all fail because the more interesting things are learned the more that we collect data the more things that we can actually approach and learn in the future and i think that's the rare thing in society nowadays everything's so theoretical everyone's got their own theory i call you know theories of everything like the ai slop of science is like everyone's got one and so my my job is really to bring you know hardcore evidence to the problem and then ask where we can go from there one

[Jonathan Cohen]

of the things that i wonder if you can speak to is you know there's a tremendous amount of interest in many aspects of physics that in many cases are actually not grounded in physics either theories or you know kind of practical applications or what have you seen in terms of people's interest in let's say life on other planets even the use of ai to try and you know predict things about the nature of reality what's been your kind of experience as someone who kind of has boots on the ground but also understands the larger picture of people's interest well i

[Dr. Brian Keating]

think you know oftentimes i say this i get into trouble for it i think like we have a moral obligation as scientists to share what we do with the public and i think too many people don't do it and the ones who sometimes do do it are so poorly trained and like i would say it's you know as an you'll appreciate it but you know it's like we're handed the greatest script ever written by the greatest author in the noble universe and here we are fumbling every single line you know and so i think we need more training for it but my scientists that are real scientists will say you shouldn't have a youtube channel you shouldn't be doing these things in outreach you shouldn't go on the mayem bialik breakdown because that's not what a serious scientist does i say oh yeah yeah i forgot you know you were born knowing quantum mechanics you know rolled out of the womb knowing you know quantum electrodynamics right no so you have to work at it and anything you care about you work at so i've been working for a while probably could do better but trying to bring as i said a hardcore data based approach to science so right now the best evidence for string theory is that it produces a lot of string theorists but you have to also understand there's a huge counter narrative people like peter thiel marc andreessen and others that are saying eric weinstein is a very good friend of mine saying you know physics has stagnated for the last five decades and it's all string theory's fault or super asymmetry's fault remember super asymmetry from one year the nobel prize so it's all the super and it's the god that failed of science and i could be sympathetic to some of that but i think they put way too much emphasis on one narrow branch of science and they kind of are overlooking you know we're all looking for this theory of everything this t o e the toe and i always say you know we haven't found a grand unified theory a gut you know you're putting the toe before the gut you know and have some experience with the gut but the point i'm trying to make is is that it's great to have ambitions but and it's great to try to approach the divine it's the highest form that you could possibly approach in science is trying to understand the base layer the operating system of reality that's what we physicists are trying to do but so often it gets completely detached from experimental verification from epistemology from even the basics of you know what you might call the scientific method and i think that is dangerous but you have to separate the sociological problems you know scientists are human you know despite the stereotype you know what's the joke about how do you know a scientist is outgoing you know he looks at your shoes when he talks to you in reality we don't have a great as i said we don't get training in how to approach these things but from my perspective the most fun thing is to collect data as i said and prove somebody wrong when you prove something wrong you get a little bit closer to

[Jonathan Cohen]

truth that's my mission i think about you know a bit about sort of your story and also a lot of your writing you know geared around understanding you know in your own words like what it's like to not win you know a nobel prize and you talk a lot about your dad and how when your dad passed away you sort of felt like there was nothing to prove anymore to anyone right and so that kind of shifted can you talk a little about your journey because you you know as you've described it you get to study the things that as children we have this natural sense of wonder this natural sense of awe around and this is what you do for a living can you talk about kind of your path how that led you essentially to not winning a nobel prize

[Dr. Brian Keating]

yeah so for me you know i always loved astronomy ever since i was a little kid and did as we all do and noticed that the moon was following me i mean we're pretty important we like to think of ourselves as really important but the moon doesn't follow us you know spoiler alert but it felt like that i was really wondering why that was as a ten year old as an eight year old whatever and then i realized well one one day i can get a telescope you know if i work hard enough if if i if i make enough money enough i get a loan from a three letter agency not the nsf but the mom my mom gave me a loan god bless her and i bought my first telescope and this was a transformation for me because i realized you could see planets without going on a satellite you could see the craters of the moon the mountains of the moon the rings of saturn you can see all these things with you know your telescope connect your eye connected to a telescope like this one that my son wanted me to show you there's a three d printed teles that he made using only the finest chinese parts and then yeah so it's obscured now by something i'm going to reveal later to you if you stay tuned that's a what do you call that an acting foreshadow yeah a tease that's right so for me it was like impossible to think someone's going to pay me to use a telescope it's like would you like a job as an ice cream taster you know how about a wizard jonathan would you enjoy being a wizard and we'll pay you you know i'm like whoa what this is crazy i can get a job doing this which is bizarre because my father had been a professor but as you said i kind of had a difficult relationship i'll get into that later but the perspective that i brought was this is incredible i do it for free it's one of those states with this guy whose name i can't pronounce like chicks you guys will know the flow state when i was in front of a telescope time disappears and i still feel like that so as my telescopes grew from something like this a couple inches across when i was a twelve year old pimple faced kid in dobbs ferry new york you know growing up to now when i have a six meter telescope at my disposal more or less with my four hundred colleagues on the simons observatory this is just a natural extension of this pure joy that i get to do and i would do it for free don't tell kevin newsom please don't tell the regents yet you know i'm still a public employee i would do it for free and i just love it so for me that the the notion that you could have a telescope and you could see back in time literally a telescope as a time machine you know i don't see you as you are this second i see you actually two nanoseconds and i see jonathan four nanoseconds ago so he looks a little bit younger you know he looks you know but but that's because light travels at a finite but very high speed of about one foot per billionth of a second so as we look back in space we're looking back in time that's why the sun the sun could you know god forbid disappear right now we wouldn't know it for eight more minutes but this would be the greatest last thing that you guys could possibly do together you shouldn't

[Jonathan Cohen]

live life like it's your last day you should live life like it's your

[Dr. Brian Keating]

last eight minutes that's the lesson so for me the cutest thing to note about it is there's a quote that i love from soren kierkegaard the very depressing scandinavian philosopher and he said life must be lived forward but you can only understand it looking backwards no else in all of science and all of society do you have a time machine to go backwards and look at the past so i find that just almost orgiastically pleasurable to think about and that we get to do it for a living it's just it's greatest privilege i think i can have what are you

[Mayim Bialik]

trying to find

[Dr. Brian Keating]

so our telescopes right now i do two different types of astronomy one is using visible wavelength light to look for forbidden symmetry violations in the early universe it's called like this if the speed of light were to change like red light travels faster than blue light we don't have any evidence of that but we could detect that in a very tiny way and that would show a violation not only of certain laws of how light travels but of einstein's relativity theory that's one branch kind of my side hustle i literally do that for fun side hustle is

[Mayim Bialik]

trying to disprove einstein got it my

[Dr. Brian Keating]

main job is in addition to teaching at uc san diego is to use the cosmic microwave background radiation it's the oldest light in the universe it's the leftover heat after god pushed the button in the microwave oven he took out whatever he was created cooked the primordial soup and in that primordial soup is a heat is a glow it's an afterglow of the fusion of the first nuclei in the periodic table so hydrogen and its isotopes into helium and so forth and that's all there was for millions perhaps billions of years until the first galaxies formed so it literally is the oldest light in the universe and as i said when you look at something back in space you're looking back in time so we're seeing a snapshot of the not just the universe the chemical processes in the universe nothing you know cultural there's no you know people around or anything like that the universe is a boiling three thousand degrees kelvin three thousand degrees above absolute zero at that time but we see the imprints of it and now we can take those imprints because it's the oldest light and use that to learn things about the physical nature of the universe at that time so again the theme today for me at least is evidence not speculation we can talk about near death experiences we can talk about alien visits i'm sure we will because you guys are you know even more diverse intellectually than i am on my show but and i love it but but me for me i love the hardcore grounding that we can sample the physical conditions of the early universe from a distance of forty five billion light years away

[Mayim Bialik]

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[Jonathan Cohen]

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[Mayim Bialik]

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[Jonathan Cohen]

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[Dr. Brian Keating]

of the reason i started my side hustle of using optical because you can actually explain to somebody what is red light you know but when you say what is microwave yeah what is the

[Jonathan Cohen]

oldest light in the universe look like

[Dr. Brian Keating]

so it it originally came out looking like ultraviolet light like extremely powerful or even gamma radiation x ray radiation it was extremely hot leftover heat when you fused two things together when you fused together it all started with a big bang when you fused together a proton and a neutron and another proton to make an isotope of helium when you do that there's some heat left over and that's where fusion energy would get its energy from that energy is in the form of heat we just we call it energy but it's heat and that heat is not in the visible wavelength or the infrared wavelength it's in the microwave today because the universe has stretched since the universe has been expanding for a factor of one thousand times since this light was produced we know that extremely accurately by the way and since the universe has been expanding it's gone from the invisible x ray radiation or gamma ray radiation to to beyond that to the microwave so it's called the cosmic microwave background so it's a cosmological signal it occurs in all directions at all times of year day and night no matter where you are on earth the south pole antarctica the mountains of chile the depths of outer space it's the same everywhere for everybody at this moment and it's cooling off and so now it's cooled off into the microwave now what does it tell you so it really does tell you about the physical conditions at the time in which it was produced so the microwaves themselves were produced long before what would become the microwaves the heat was produced from fusion but then the universe expanded it expanded for a long time until about half a million years after the big bang when that time period occurred the universe had cooled enough that hydrogen could form so before that it was protons and electrons just like ping ponging around bouncing around you know the probability of them exactly so they couldn't come together because as soon as they came together and combined to make hydrogen they got zapped apart by a high energy energy photon but eventually the universe expands so much those photons are really far apart they're really cold they've cooled off i mean they've cooled off into the you know infrared and millimeter wave they've cooled off enough that now hydrogen can be stabilized when that happens the universe becomes transparent the light just goes from straight there to wherever it's going to go and eventually it ends up in our telescopes in chile or the south pole so it's sampling the physical and chemical properties of the universe by its wavelength by its spectrum by its intensity and what we study specifically is called its polarization most people don't know but light has three properties its intensity how bright it is its color the wavelength it has and its polarization which is the orientation of the electromagnetic field okay what does that mean you have polarized sunglasses i'm sure i hope you do in california we need what's that i

[Jonathan Cohen]

don't like them i can't look at my phone with them they have to

[Dr. Brian Keating]

take it off that's right but no one else can look at their phone so polarized sunglasses reduce the glare so glare is polar look at this table right here okay here's a perfect example see how the glare on the table i don't know if the shots will get it if we had glasses we could modulate that and there would be no glare that's why you wear it if you wear them at the beach you can see through the glare in the ocean you can see the fish the shark that's coming to get you whatever that's why polarization is interesting but polarization tells us about the physical nature of space time when these photons were produced that make up the cmb that we observe today why is that important well we have this big bang theory but i like to say we don't know who put the bang in the big bang i went to england i gave a talk at the royal society royal institution and it was a lot of fun because michael faraday used to work or james clerk maxwell would hang out it's a storied place and i said you know we're trying to find today the big banger and i put up a picture of you know sausages and mashed potatoes they call sausages bangers and so the what what put the bang in the big bang we don't know there's a candidate theory for it proposed in nineteen eighty called inflation inflation is the hyper accelerated expansion of space time that then produced the heat that then became the big bang so most people think the big bang is time equals zero that's wrong that's absolutely wrong scientists don't think the big bang is time equals zero we don't think that's when there was a singularity or perhaps when there was appreciating universe which is now another theory we can discuss a what a preceding universe that collapsed to make our universe okay that's a candidate theory let's talk about that later but we don't know right now just in the big bang theory one of the many gaps in our knowledge is what caused it to bang there was no explanation for it i always say to my students i say flaws lead to new laws in other words when you discover something is missing in a theory that's a good place for you to start to do research don't do research on the twelfth decimal place of some of some esoteric process right and nobody's going to really care about that you could do it if you like to each his own right so what did the big bang come along let's start back at the beginning literally the big bang came along to explain this peculiar expanding universe that edwin hubble observed from about eight miles away over there in mount wilson above caltech he observed galaxies were moving away from each other with the exception of two or three thousands of galaxies on the universe only two or three are coming towards us the rest are red shifted they're moving away from us the implication is the universe expanding if you run that movie back all the way back you get a point when all those galaxies were smushing and being intimate okay they're right up next to each other that is what we call the big bang but we don't say what came to ignite that big bang that's when the matter that started to expand today began its process of expansion what caused that to happen what are our choices so there's many different choices for a long time there was no big bang actually einstein also not far from here at caltech he believed for many years the universe was static and you know what he was a damn good scientist okay he had this notion that the universe was our galaxy alone as most scientists did nowadays we take it for granted right there's billions of galaxies literally a trillion galaxies each one has a billion or a trillion stars trillions of stars in it right and so you get trillions square just incomprehensible numbers right but the question that einstein said is well i look around the galaxy i see half the stars are coming towards me half are moving away the galaxies rotating that's the universe that's all there is so he had to explain that in a theory where gravity unlike electricity is only attractive gravity only attracts other things it doesn't repel like electrostatic forces opposites attract and like there's no such thing as repellent gravity as far as we know we're open to ideas for that but this so he had to stabilize the universe or else he wouldn't be here to ask the question of why does the universe exist at all so he put something in it he called it the cosmological constant it was a form of what we now call dark energy and it was meant to stabilize the universe against gravity pulling it all together and smushing us into a black hole basically

[Jonathan Cohen]

so basically there's something keeping us from

[Dr. Brian Keating]

being smushed exactly and that anti smushing force as you know technically is called he called that the cosmological constant and then he was a good enough scientist to recognize when hubble took him up to the eyepiece of mount wilson right here he looked at the telescope he said you're right i was wrong and this cosmological term that i fudge factored i inserted into my equations against my better angels of my nature it was actually my biggest blunder now fast forward to nineteen ninety eight cosmologists discover actually the universe does have this type of expansive force that's accelerating and so i always point out that einstein's biggest blunder was saying it was his blunder and i use that with my wife i say honey you know if i made one mistake it was i thought i made a mistake and i'm sleeping stakes

[Jonathan Cohen]

are pretty low though yeah i can't help but think of sort of the you know the old testament kind of concept and also the mystical implications of that you know i'm not like oh the old testament says and therefore it's a science book but the mystical implications of how do you imagine what nothingness looks like right what is before there is right and that's sort of like the mystical concept and what i love is that you're not afraid to talk about some of these parallels because you know we just spoke to sir robert edward grant a very unusual kind of polymath but his big thing his overarching thing is like like everything repeats everywhere you can find it everywhere we're all just mirrors everything is like self and shadow and all this stuff but i think about it even with this like what are these patterns that we're seeing so yeah if you could kind of help us understand what could come before and how do we even imagine that

[Dr. Brian Keating]

my job is to ask the question and maybe answer it but certainly ask it what happened on the tuesday before the big bang there are certain conceptions where that doesn't make any sense in fact stephen hawking the late great stephen hawking said asking what happened before the big bang is like asking what's north of the north pole but we all know what's north of santa so i always turn around south pole i've been to the south pole when you get to the south pole and you go south of the south pole you're going north actually there's nowhere to go but north from the south pole so is there a possibility that you could go before time if time came into existence so not only did the universe we have to kind of wrap our minds around something right not only did all the matter that would later become us i can take us on that journey too but for now we stipulate that we're made of matter that this came specifically from the big bang it came from the first moments we don't know stardust well stardust is actually so carl sagan made that case right he said we're all stardust so this is a meteorite one of my many gifts for you guys today is a meteorite so this is a real meteorite this is star stuff the hydrogen is not star stuff the hydrogen in your body in the liquid whatever that you drink the hydrogen is big bang stuff it's even more mind blowing than star stuff this came from a supernova that exploded in our neighborhood in the galaxy about one hundred fifty million years before the earth was created this predates the earth and it's made of very different materials then the hydrogen in this guy that's made of iron nickel cobalt and i'm going to give you some data sheets on this and you can share it with people amazing i'll give away some to your substack seriously for your readers because i love that i'm a paid subscriber i love it come on i do my homework but we're mostly made of big bang stuff so what happened the tuesday before the big bang is a legitimate question if and only if the universe existed before that even if time came into existence as we know it right if time came into existence at some moment like this is the way i think about it we're here on a tuesday i'm asking the question what happened on tuesday before the big bang we can keep going back twenty four hour periods right we go back seven twenty four hour periods last tuesday keep going keep you eventually get back thirteen point eight two six billion years and that's some day maybe it was a tuesday maybe it wasn't let's say it was a wednesday i want to know what happened the day before now that question doesn't make sense if time came into existence at that moment right a

[Jonathan Cohen]

lot of people think of especially like if you're you know with no insult you're not a you're not like trained in science people think that like time exists and then we got inserted into it and like the calendar was going and it was going and there was a january or whatever there was a tuesday and then we evolved but time only exists because of matter having you get it being stretched yeah so it's like you can't know what happened before time because there was no time so

[Dr. Brian Keating]

if there's a relationship between time and temperature there's a big mystery in science called the arrow of time the mystery of the hour of time right the laws of nature seem to be reversible in other words if i show you a ticking grandfather clock a pendulum going back and forth and i ask you turn away and now look at it where did it start from three weeks ago you can't possibly know you can't even tell if you're looking at it in reverse or looking at it you

[Jonathan Cohen]

mean if you take a snapshot yeah

[Dr. Brian Keating]

if you just look at it you can't tell or same with the solar system we don't if you were upside down looking at the solar system from below what's upside down yeah there's no notion of what's right side up or upside down so the question is does that apply to time it applies to space does it apply to so where do the laws of physics break off from being time you know irreversible and time bound to being time irreversible like when you mix coffee and cream together you don't spontaneously see them break apart into two different sets of cream and coffee right so the hour of time did that have a starting point or did it emerge from a preceding universe that sort of sacrificed itself collapsed just like the star that became this meteorite exploded spewing its guts all over the solar all over our galaxy to birth our solar system so too there could be a preceding universe that collapsed exploded if you will and became our existing

[Jonathan Cohen]

observer but we can't see that well

[Dr. Brian Keating]

can we can we infer that it exists so in science we have multiple ways of arriving at some approximation of truth don't forget you know when we talk about things i often hear you you know talk to people and ask you know what do you believe in this do you believe so i i would say i don't even believe in gravity i don't believe in gravity i don't believe in evolution i have evidence for evolution i have evidence for science i have evidence in science i have evidence for gravity but in science our job isn't to prove things but people confuse us with mathematicians mathematician can prove one plus one equals two despite what my friend terrence howard thinks but well

[Jonathan Cohen]

one pile of laundry plus one pile of laundry does not equal two piles

[Dr. Brian Keating]

of laundry that's right yeah exactly right but i say give you one royalty for your movie and i give you another would you only take one royalty terence he wouldn't answer me so so so to prove one plus one equals two it's a trivial thing right no it's not it actually takes over two hundred pages of rigorous mathematical proof but you can get there you can actually prove it called a piano that's math math proofs exist physics there's no such thing as a proof right i cannot prove that the earth is spherical right people write to me all the time professor keating they say the earth is flat i have proof and i say people write to me from all around the globe asking me to prove that the earth is flat the globe around the globe anyway so in reality we can't prove a physical fact actually the earth isn't perfectly spherical it bulges at the equator it looks like but you can't even get all the coordinate points to define exactly what it is because it's changing it's dynamic right there are no facts in science but what you can do is you can falsify things and this is interesting to me because people always ask me how do you reconcile being religious and being scientific so i now the most important thing about a scientific truth perhaps the closest you can come to truth and proof is resistance to being wrong to resistance to what's called falsification so i can't prove that the earth is a perfect sphere but i can't prove it's not flat i cannot prove that the sun will always come up in the east right something could physically happen it's not outside the laws of the earth's rotation could switch around and the sun would come up in the wild they're just saying it's not outside the laws of physics therefore it cannot be proven but you could falsify for today it did come

[Jonathan Cohen]

up well i mean you just defined faith because when people ask me especially like how can you be a scientist and how can you have faith and i said and i say this to my kids you know because i have kids at that age right do you believe that the sun will come up tomorrow and they say well yeah of course i said that's what it feels like like that's what it feels like the way that you honor that the way that you commemorate it the way you pray over it that's culturally specific and that depends on your particular dna and your personality and where you raised and how all the things line up but it's the same faith like to me it's like that's why when people like how can you be a scientist and a person of it how could

[Dr. Brian Keating]

you not well i'll never criticize you know people for having faith or not having faith i've talked to the greatest atheists in the world the greatest agnostics in the world the greatest you know theologically inclined so i'll never complain and you point out ninety percent of the national academy of sciences in the united states the most prestigious scientific society in the history of the planet does not actively proclaim a belief in god they're either atheist or they're agnostic and so look are they not good scientists of course they're great scientists have there been incredible religious scientists throughout history of course there have that was the norm right right and so that to me is not a question but you hit the nail on the head to say in judaism we use the term amuna emunah is a sense and it's where the word amen comes from in english or in latin these notions are of so if i had faith in something that by definition means it's not subject to scientific scrutiny otherwise i could have proof right so i say and you wouldn't get any credit for it either having faith okay i have faith in grow there's a lot of proof for it no i would have to subjugate that sense of my needs to you know someone's notion of putting me in a box and saying what i am or am not entitled to believe as a scientist i'll choose for myself thank you

[Mayim Bialik]

very much let's go back to the idea of the theory of everything people are trying to figure out what's happening now they're looking for clues and they're looking for like what's going to happen in the planet moving forward right and a lot of those theories are connected to god describe your search for something that unifies everything even if it has failed like where mayim bialix breakdown is supported by tumble you know life can

[Jonathan Cohen]

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[Mayim Bialik]

after you purchase they'll ask you where you heard about them please support our show and tell them our show sent you mind bialix breakdown is supported by the international association of near death studies

[Jonathan Cohen]

do near death experiences and related phenomena fascinate you are you curious for more information about this spiritually impactful experience great news because a spiritual super bowl is coming to seattle august twenty sixth through thirtieth the international association for near death studies or iands will host its annual conference at the hyatt regency in bel air the event features an all star lineup of keynotes like proof of heaven author eben alexander maryland and dying to be me author anita moorjani iands will also offer a continuing education for professionals a healing center exhibit floor bookstore and a fun filled saturday night party early bird registration rates are available through july fifteenth visit iands dot org now and join the thousands of people who are expected to attend you'll experience connection with an incredible community of near death experiencers and seekers and experience insights and inspiration

[Mayim Bialik]

you never imagined there are you in

[Dr. Brian Keating]

that process so i like to decouple and i say it's perfectly acceptable as i said before my here's my land acknowledgment you don't have to believe in god you can be a great scientist obviously you could be a great you can be a great person and be an atheist you could be religious and be a jerk whatever these are not these shouldn't be controversial things unfortunately a lot of times they are in in my conception religion and science are like looking at you know completely different sides perhaps at the same coin but maybe not we like to say things like oh well you're not good at at math but you're good at music and and you know they said they say that music and math are really i'm like yeah pythagoras did you know four thousand three thousand years two thousand years ago you know he thought they were the strings and the rhythm of the cosmos i mean the guy was you know he was also you know did a lot of crazy other things right let's let's not base our kind of notions and hopes and trying to build up our self esteem you're either good like i always say i'm good at

[Jonathan Cohen]

math you're not as good as pythagoras he was pretty good that's totally true

[Dr. Brian Keating]

that's right but you know the closest i come to music is you know playing spotify my brother on the other hand not good at math very good at playing music so we can be different people and they can be completely unrelated to each other right but for my personal approach to it when i look and think about questions first of all i look at what is the purpose of this of this subject what is the ontology that we're trying to capitulate right so for religion in my case you know i did have a relatively strange upbringing religiously i mean born jewish to both jewish parents parents got divorced as was very you know i think you got a certificate to do that when in the nineteen seventies when i grew up so both parents were divorced both divorced twice really good at marriage really good at divorce and so i grew up with my stepfather his name was keating my original name was axe axe my my biological father james axe and i grew up in an irish catholic background so i had exposure to irish catholic doctrine i was actually baptized at age nine converted at age ten confirmed at age eleven and became an altar boy at age twelve stop it yep i loved it i loved being an altar boy it was so unlike the judaism you know i called myself we were today year jews before you know we'd go to synagogue on christmas and easter you know two days a year and we really didn't have any connection to it and then i came into catholicism and it was like warm and boisterous and loving and passionate and it could be solemn too and i just loved that and took to it and so instead of having a bar mitzvah at age twelve i was an altar boy at the church of saint john saint mary and i just loved it and i had so much fun with it didn't have my bar mitzvah until i turned fifty two four times thirteen and i was able to have my children and my wife at my bar mitzvah not too many bar mitzvah boys have their children at the bar mitzvah at the kotel at the western wall in israel but anyway my upbringing exposure to it took me to explore the doctrines behind catholicism christianity generally and then i didn't explore judaism for a long time because i became disillusioned by it thanks to becoming a know it all scientist at age twelve you know at the same time i got my was was being an altar boy and should have had my bar mitzvah i got my first telescope and at that time it was in the mid nineteen eighties i fell in love with still my current hero in all of science galileo galileo had provided some of the first empirical evidence based data that the earth goes around the sun it was the first time copernicus came up with the idea he was just kind of guessing i mean you know it made sense it was maybe it was more empirical but actually ptolemaic astronomy which is the epicycle cosmology made a lot more sense sense at that time in nineteen eighty six around then the catholic church had not pardoned galileo for the crime which they imprisoned him for the remaining nine years of his life they imprisoned him for exclaiming and teaching that the earth goes around the sun his

[Jonathan Cohen]

crime was looking up the truth yeah that's what the indigo girl said that's

[Dr. Brian Keating]

right so now as a twelve or thirteen year old kind of snot nosed kid just learning about science and then kind of looking for an excuse not to go to church or not to go to temple people i thought this is this is horrible like how do you treat people like that and then wait till you get to giordano bruno you know burned alive at the stake in sixteen hundred for the heresy of suggesting that stars had planets around them which you know totally off about you know guy was you know he wasn't ahead of his time by four hundred years so i was like the catholic church is murdering scientists that's crazy i don't know if i want to be a part of this anymore i literally lost my religion remember when when that came about i became an atheist for a long time and then i came back to judaism later surrounding nine eleven and other things we can talk about later actually the thing that made me leave you know catholicism the most perhaps is you know i wanted to go all the way like whenever i do something i want to do it the best way again the science i want to win a nobel prize i got into altar but i want to become a priest but age thirteen fourteen certain hormones start to kick in you know from your sons right i realized i couldn't be a priest and that probably also put me over the edge like i'm not going to to do it right but getting back to the what i always like to do i'm a purist so i like to look at the pure text what does the text say about the claims not what do people say the text does i used to hate it when rabbis or priests would tell me this is what you have to believe and this is the path to truth and i am the conduit for your faith no i'm a scientist i'm actually pretty smart i can figure things out i can teach myself things if i need to i may be a monomath you talk a lot about polymaths and i'm a monomath but i can be quite good at that that's my only skill perhaps right is scholastic i'm a scholar right so i looked into the what is these books saying right so leaving aside you know the new testament let's go to the old testament what is the old testament saying about the big bang what does it say about science why is it why why do people even ask the question you know if i saw a book like a brief history of time and i read it i say there's no tips on improving my long game in golf like this book is like you would never say that right because it's not a book about golf right it's a book about origin theories of the universe literally of time right it's wonderful in that domain don't try to use it as a parenting manual don't try to use it as a golf you know learning golf right so what is it actually saying in the torah about the not don't tell me so it actually has and i've counted these verses torah itself the old testament the bible has thirty five thousand give or take verses total in all the five books of moses right as it's called about thirty five of those thirty five thousand verses are about the seven days of creation the first shabbat the creation cain and abel killing each other garden of eden the expulsion the snake all those that's thirty five total verses and yeah it has this enormous impact on humanity right for all the major you

[Jonathan Cohen]

know it's also first so it's like what most people get through right exactly

[Dr. Brian Keating]

right i would say i'd kill for one percent of god's book sales you know it's still relevant today right whatever you want to say it's an old book right it's at least thirty centuries old right so when i look at that i say what was it trying to do then and how is it still relevant to today if it's got thirty five verses and there's thirty five thousand total verses that's zero point one percent of the torah of the bible is about creation cosmology dna right if you read the history of the nba there's about zero point one percent of the nba has been jewish right madhuri stoudemire a couple other guys now we have danny the portland trailblazers guy from israel right it's only zero point one but there's been tens of thousands of players right so you would say like this is not a book about you know the nba is not about jews primarily i mean there may be a couple but let's look at what it's really about okay if you want to look at the cosmology in it the sun the moon created on the fourth day you don't think the rabbis you know moses or even it was people that wrote it they didn't know that the sun is what defines a day of they did so why does it say that the sun was created on the fourth day look at the realm the kingdoms that the israelites were surrounded by israel was surrounded by egypt by babylonia those were the world powers what did they believe they had the god of the sun ra ra is the god of the sun in egypt and that's one of the defining stories of the jewish faith which is the narrative underlying christianity and islam as well right so this creation story comes to tell us no the sun is so unimportant as a god that was created not until the fourth day after herbs and whatever else well we always used to

[Jonathan Cohen]

say how could you see if the sun wasn't there to give light obviously

[Dr. Brian Keating]

they knew that right no one writes a book it was a purpose for that that it was to signify it was created so now it also bothers me when apologeticists i don't know if you guys have had on like a true christian apologist or jewish apologist gerald schroeder is a very famous one in the jewish faith my friend stephen c meyer john lennox william lane craig is perhaps the most famous one apologetics is explaining scientific phenomena with the understanding that they're trying to prove the existence of god so the most common one the most famous one traces back thousands of years actually saint augustine and others it's called the column cosmological argument so it goes like this it says the everything that we see that was created was created it didn't exist and then existed kind of like what you're saying before about the big bang right except for the universe for the universe to come into existence at a certain point in time it needed to have been created all things that are created have a creator it may be many chains down

[Jonathan Cohen]

i mean you can have the same conversation about consciousness exactly it is the same exact conversation yeah is it fundamental was it inserted like where did it

[Dr. Brian Keating]

come from there are sort of like multiple big bangs we think there's one big bang no no no no there's many big bangs right there's a big bang that we talk about as creation of the universe that created matter say from pure energy so you had non material entities created creating something that was matter actual massive things you could put on a scale then those things later congealed and made planets right and then those planets congealed and we can talk about all the different theories of biogenesis right and they made life so life non conscious life basic life came from matter that was not conscious so conscious emerged in a big bang something from nothing something from nothing so i'm fascinated to hear what yeah that you're mentioning that exact same line of thinking this

[Jonathan Cohen]

is a question that we ask a lot of different ways when we talk to people we ask astrophysicists it's at the basis of also the lay people that we speak to who travel to dimensions that we cannot understand so when people are declared dead and zipped into a body bag for two hours and some emt in the back of an ambulance decides i'm gonna see what happens if i unzip and shock right that's astounding and when people come back from those experiences and say i gotta tell you what just happened right and it is beyond articulation and it shares so many threads in common that's what we're asking like how are we separate how are you reporting things that happened in a room that your body was locked in where is consciousness like where is it is it literally this entity that can float around like i have a very hard time with that and also when you speak to like you know any educated hippie who will say there's a plane that i can tap into that many people cannot and there is information in that plane the same way if you have bad hearing and you can't hear the radio if it's not turned up enough they don't need it turned up as high right like and this is this notion we were just talking about the infrasonic range and i was like what the fuck is that turns out it's a thing and there are people who are more sensitive to sounds under twenty hertz like this is news to me i mean maybe it was taught to me sometime but i'm thinking what does that mean for our conscious experience there are people who are more sensitive and you can say that literally you can say it emotionally and conceptually there is this variation in the human experience and for some people they they will call it god they will call it this is my source and other people will not i mean the thing that i always say is like i don't really care what you call it like if you drop something it's gonna drop at nine point eight feet per second like that that's it you know and that's kind of what you were talking about it's not about belief i don't have to believe in gravity it just is you know and when people say like oh why do bad things happen to good people i say well those are human words that you have human judgment on you don't know the path of the larger universe and the thought that also we would be i'm not saying i don't have a god that cares but those are also human concepts like we're just anthropomorphizing the hell out of god right like that like literally that's what we do because we're we're meaning makers and that's what our brain will do i see a pattern i see it it's clicking together it's gonna make sense i'm gonna make it make sense and then you become a fanatic and you try and make other people believe in your god and like that's also insane this also ties

[Mayim Bialik]

back to the notion of the theory of everything because there are elements that seem to be still we're not able to describe them we're not able to understand them there are phenomenon like like the people who have claimed to have near death experiences well even dark matter

[Jonathan Cohen]

dark energy like where does it go

[Mayim Bialik]

all that all of that stuff that's in the universe that we don't understand what it is or where it came from like it seems to be still or we're not able yet to pull together a theory of everything how do you reconcile not your proof in god but your faith and your personal experience outside of religion can you speak to

[Dr. Brian Keating]

that do you have a sister because i'm starting to think like i need a co host on my podcast because you're very good at like bringing us back like i have this like you know very volatile short term memory and i'm like i know he asked me about the theory of everything a couple hours ago and maybe a couple hours ago you know that's your time flies when you're having fun right so thank

[Jonathan Cohen]

you very much he does have assistance

[Mayim Bialik]

she's not as good as this as

[Jonathan Cohen]

i am she's not as quick as

[Mayim Bialik]

him she takes some time she has

[Dr. Brian Keating]

other skills so yeah so to me there's you know first of all we have to think about like this notion of belief like i said in addition to not looking for things i believe in as a scientist i also feel like just as a in common sense like is god sitting around like wait i hope brian believes in me today like this would make my day oh boy my cv no i'm totally inconsequential on one hand on the other hand we're supposed to have these two different pockets right there's a great talmud sage who said man his name was shlomo de vardisha of like some ukrainian name that i can pronounce but i can't pronounce right and he said a man should have two pockets and in each one he should have a note in one hand and in one pocket he should have a note that says the whole world was created for me on the other hand when he feels too haughty too cocky he's looks maxing too much he should pull it out and say i am nothing but dust and ashes so i should have these two opposing forces and it's very difficult for the human mind as you said the human mind likes to create patterns to draw extrapolations to do induction scientific method inductive version deductive version and we love to induce patterns because that helps us survive right you see the squiggle on the ground is it a snake or is it a stick it's not going to keep you alive he thinks every

[Jonathan Cohen]

stick is a snake i don't like snakes he's very tuned in by the

[Dr. Brian Keating]

way what's brown and sticky a stick okay that's a dad joke courtesy of my son okay this is pretty good

[Mayim Bialik]

pretty good i like a dad joke

[Jonathan Cohen]

we're going to hit pause here there's so much more in part two of our conversation with doctor brian keating we're going to talk about religion can god's existence be subjected to scientific tests he's

[Mayim Bialik]

also going to talk about the near death experience that alfred nobel had it's an unbelievable story that spawns the creation of the nobel prize what does it

[Jonathan Cohen]

look like to search for extraterrestrial life are we in a simulation and how does he explain the recent deaths and disappearances of significant us scientists linked to nuclear research and aerospace programs we cannot wait for you to hear part two of our conversation with doctor doctor brian

[Dr. Brian Keating]

keating it's maya bialik's breakdown she's gonna break it down for you she's got a neuroscience phd or two and now she's gonna break down it's a breakdown she's gonna break it down

[Mayim Bialik]

mind bialix breakdown is supported by elastique where science meets style in wearable wellness elastique athletics

[Jonathan Cohen]

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