Think Like A Nobel Prize Winner

Guido W. Imbens, along with David Card and Joshua Angrist, shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics for “methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships”. In 2017 he received the Horace Mann medal at Brown University. An honor shared by your host Professor Brian Keating. He is The Applied Econometrics Professor of Economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business since 2012, and has also taught at Harvard University, UCLA, and UC Berkeley. He holds an honorary degree from the University of St Gallen. He is also the Amman Mineral Faculty Fellow at the Stanford GSB.  Imbens specializes in econometrics, and in particular methods for drawing causal inferences from experimental and observational data. He has published extensively in the leading economics and statistics journals. Together with Donald Rubin he has published a book, "Causal Inference in Statistics, Social and Biomedical Sciences”. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society, the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Statistical Association. He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of St. Gallen. In this episode, Professor Imbens give his lecture on his Nobel Prize-winning thesis. See the video with the slides here: https://youtu.be/X632K3n8PPI Connect with me:

In his acclaimed latest book, The Primacy of Doubt: From Quantum Physics to Climate Change, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our Chaotic World, Professor Timothy Palmer argues that embracing the mathematics of uncertainty is vital to understanding ourselves and the universe around us. Whether we want to predict climate change or market crashes, understand how the brain is able to outpace supercomputers or find a theory that links quantum and cosmological physics, Palmer shows how his vision of mathematical uncertainty provides new insights into some of the deepest problems in science. The result is a revolution—one that shows that power begins by embracing what we don't know. The Primacy of Doubt on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Primacy-Doubt-Quantum-Uncertainty-Understand/dp/1541619714 Timothy Palmer is the Royal Society Research Professor in Climate Physics, and a Senior Fellow at the Oxford Martin Institute at the University of Oxford. He is a mathematical physicist who has spent most of his career working on the dynamics and predictability of weather and climate. He pioneered the development of probabilistic ensemble forecasting techniques for weather and climate prediction, techniques that are now standard in weather and climate forecasting around the world. In 2021 Professor Palmer was awarded an honorary fellowship of the Institute of Physics. Professor Palmer was involved in the first five IPCC assessment reports, and was co-chair of the international scientific steering group of the World Climate Research Programme project (CLIVAR) on climate variability and predictability.

NIST Fellow William D. Phillips received the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics “for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.” He shared the honor with Steven Chu and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji. Their work combined to create some of the most important technologies of modern atomic physics, which thousands of researchers worldwide employ today for a wide variety of applications. Today, he joins us to discuss time keeping throughout history and breakthroughs on the way to the best clocks ever made! Phillips began his experiments with laser trapping and cooling shortly after he arrived in 1978 at the National Bureau of Standards (the agency that became NIST), with the intent of creating a more accurate atomic clock. Several of his innovations in the following years became landmarks in the field. These included a device using a laser along with a magnetic field to decelerate and cool an atomic beam (the “Zeeman slower”); demonstrating the first device that trapped electrically neutral atoms (a magnetic trap); and measuring a temperature far below that predicted by the accepted theory of laser cooling at the time (known as sub-Doppler cooling). Watch the video with slides here: https://youtu.be/q1cPyE9rAD4 Connect with me:

A conversation with Nobel Prize Winner and renowned mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Dr. Stuart Hameroff about consciousness and quantum mechanics. Sir Roger Penrose and Dr. Stuart Hameroff have tackled one of the most vexing problems in science -- how does consciousness work? Their theories of consciousness were selected by the Templeton Foundation for study. We will discuss Is the brain a sophisticated computer or an intuitive thinking device? Following on from their conference in Tucson which pitted Integrated Information Theory (IIT) against Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR), Sir Roger Penrose OM and Stuart Hameroff discuss the current state of theories that might explain human consciousness and objections to them from FQXI and others. Sir Roger Penrose describe examples of ‘non-computability' in human consciousness, thoughts and actions such as the way we evaluate particular chess positions which cast doubt on ‘Turing' computation as a complete explanation of brain function. As a source of non-computability, Roger discuss his ‘objective reduction' (‘OR') self-collapse of the quantum wavefunction which is a potential resolution for the ‘measurement problem' in quantum mechanics, and a mechanism for non-computable physics. Dr. Stuart Hameroff reviews neuronal and biophysical aspects of Orch OR, in which ‘orchestrated' quantum vibrations occur among entangled brain microtubules and evolve toward Orch OR threshold and consciousness. The nature, feasibility, decoherence times and evidence for quantum vibrations in microtubules, their role and correlation with consciousness, effects upon them of anesthetic gases and psychedelic drug molecules will be discussed, along with Orch OR criticisms and predictions of microtubule quantum vibrations as therapeutic targets for mental and cognitive disorders. Be my friend:

A conversation with Nobel Prize Winner and renowned mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Dr. Stuart Hameroff about consciousness and quantum mechanics. Sir Roger Penrose and Dr. Stuart Hameroff have tackled one of the most vexing problems in science -- how does consciousness work? Their theories of consciousness were selected by the Templeton Foundation for study. We will discuss Is the brain a sophisticated computer or an intuitive thinking device? Following on from their conference in Tucson which pitted Integrated Information Theory (IIT) against Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR), Sir Roger Penrose OM and Stuart Hameroff discuss the current state of theories that might explain human consciousness and objections to them from FQXI and others. Sir Roger Penrose describe examples of ‘non-computability' in human consciousness, thoughts and actions such as the way we evaluate particular chess positions which cast doubt on ‘Turing' computation as a complete explanation of brain function. As a source of non-computability, Roger discuss his ‘objective reduction' (‘OR') self-collapse of the quantum wavefunction which is a potential resolution for the ‘measurement problem' in quantum mechanics, and a mechanism for non-computable physics. Dr. Stuart Hameroff reviews neuronal and biophysical aspects of Orch OR, in which ‘orchestrated' quantum vibrations occur among entangled brain microtubules and evolve toward Orch OR threshold and consciousness. The nature, feasibility, decoherence times and evidence for quantum vibrations in microtubules, their role and correlation with consciousness, effects upon them of anesthetic gases and psychedelic drug molecules will be discussed, along with Orch OR criticisms and predictions of microtubule quantum vibrations as therapeutic targets for mental and cognitive disorders. Be my friend:

@NASAWebb Senior Project Scientist, and @NobelPrize winner, John Mather answers questions about the JWST from listeners of Into The Impossible.

Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass marks the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs Boson. On July 4, 2012, the announcement came that one of the longest-running mysteries in physics had been solved: the Higgs boson, the missing piece in understanding why particles have mass, had finally been discovered. On the rostrum, surrounded by jostling physicists and media, was the particle's retiring namesake—the only person in history to have an existing single-particle named for them. Why Peter Higgs? Drawing on years of conversations with Higgs and others, Close illuminates how an unprolific man became one of the world's most famous scientists. Close finds that scientific competition between people, institutions, and states played as much of a role in making Higgs famous as Higgs's work did. Author of 20 books about science, Frank Close is Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics and Fellow Emeritus at Exeter College. He was formerly Head of the Theoretical Physics Division at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, vice President of the British Science Association, and Head of Communications and Public Understanding at CERN. He was awarded the Kelvin Medal of the Institute of Physics for his 'outstanding contributions to the public understanding of physics' in 1996, an OBE for 'services to research and the public understanding of science' in 2000, and the Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize for communicating science in 2013. He is the only professional physicist to have won a British Science Writers Prize on three occasions.

Chat with Nobel Prize winner Adam Riess about his team's newest measurements of the 'most important number in cosmology' the Hubble Constant. Using the Hubble Space Telescope for what it was meant to do, Adam's team continues to make ultra-precise measurements. We'll also explore the Hubble Tension, the future of Hubble now that the James Webb Space Telescope has deployed, and other cosmic conundrums. Adam is a brilliant teacher and a wonderful raconteur. Don't miss your chance to chat with a brilliant scientist about the most important topic in cosmology today! From the team: https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2022/news-2022-005 From CNN: Measuring the expansion rate of the universe was one of the Hubble Space Telescope's main goals when it was launched in 1990. Over the past 30 years, the space observatory has helped scientists discover and refine that accelerating rate – as well as uncover a mysterious wrinkle that only brand-new physics may solve. Hubble has observed more than 40 galaxies that include pulsating stars as well as exploding stars called supernovae to measure even greater cosmic distances. Both of these phenomena help astronomers to mark astronomical distances like mile markers, which have pointed to the expansion rate. In the quest to understand how quickly our universe expands, astronomers already made one unexpected discovery in 1998: “dark energy.” This phenomenon acts as a mysterious repulsive force that accelerates the expansion rate. And there is another twist: an unexplained difference between the expansion rate of the local universe versus that of the distant universe right after the big bang. Scientists don't understand the discrepancy but acknowledge that it's weird and could require new physics. “You are getting the most precise measure of the expansion rate for the universe from the gold standard of telescopes and cosmic mile markers,” said Nobel Laureate Adam Riess at the Space Telescope Science Institute and a distinguished professor at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, in a statement. “This is what the Hubble Space Telescope was built to do, using the best techniques we know to do it. This is likely Hubble's magnum opus, because it would take another 30 years of Hubble's life to even double this sample size.” Adam Guy Riess (born December 16, 1969) is an American astrophysicist and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute. He is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmological probes. Riess shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Brian P. Schmidt for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Connect with Brian: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  https://facebook.com/losingthenobelprize  https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating  Please join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php  Produced by Stuart Volkow (P.G.A) and Brian Keating Edited by Stuart Volkow Music:  Yeti Tears Miguel Tully - www.facebook.com/yetitears/ Theo Ryan - http://the-omusic.com/

In 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell made an astounding discovery. On 28 November 1967, she detected a "bit of scruff" on her chart-recorder papers that tracked across the sky with the stars. The signal had been visible in data taken in August, but as the papers had to be checked by hand, it took her three months to find it. She established that the signal was pulsing with great regularity, at a rate of about one pulse every one and a third seconds. Temporarily dubbed "Little Green Man 1" (LGM-1) the source (now known as PSR B1919+21) was identified after several years as a rapidly rotating neutron star. But as a young woman in science, her role was overlooked. Today's discussion is with one of the foremost astronomers of our time in a deep and revealing interview that shares a more personal side of her than ever before. In addition to describing her experimental research, we describe the surprising initial reaction to what was initially thought to be aliens, or Little Green Men. Since then we reveal what we've learned about fascinating pulsars as well as what that may reveal about life in the universe. We also chat about her religion (Quaker) and mine (Jewish) and how her view of God has evolved. We discuss her book "A Quaker Astronomer Reflects: Can a Scientist also be Religious? ", the Multiverse and Quakers: influence of mentors like Sir Fred Hoyle, the Nobel Prize and answer audience questions. Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell DBE FRS FRSE FRAS FInstP is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who was president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2002 to 2004, president of the Institute of Physics from October 2008 until October 2010, and interim president of the Institute following the death of her successor, Marshall Stoneham, in early 2011. In 2018, she was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. Following the announcement of the award, she decided to use the £2.3 million prize money to establish the Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship Fund, to help female, minority and refugee students become physics researchers. The fund is administered by the Institute of Physics. Bell on God "Recognising that there was not going to be any proof of the existence of God, I decided many years ago to adopt as a ‘working hypothesis' the assumption that there was a God, a God that I will describe below, and to see how I got on with this picture of God. Perhaps evidence would accumulate that would lead me to decide that the hypothesis was wrong, that there was no God, or that God was very different from what I had imagined."

#BlackHole #Singularity #AdaptiveOptics Reinhard Genzel studied physics at Bonn Univ., and received his doctorate at the Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy Bonn (1978), He was a Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (1978-1980), Cambridge, MA, was Associate Professor of Physics and Associate Research Astronomer, Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley (1981- 1985), Full Professor of Physics, University of California, Berkeley (1985-1986). He is Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (since 1986), Honorary Professor Munich Univ. (since 1988), Full Professor of Physics University of California Berkeley (since 1999). Professor Reinhard was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics 2020 together with Roger Penrose and Andrea Ghez "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the center of our galaxy." Since nothing, not even light, can escape black holes, they can only be observed by the radiation and the movement of nearby objects. Since the 1990s, Reinhard and Andrea Ghez, with their respective research teams, have developed and refined techniques for studying the movement of stars. Observations of stars in the area around Sagittarius A* in the middle of our galaxy, the Milky Way, revealed a supermassive black hole. https://www.mpe.mpg.de/ir/gravity https://www.eso.org/sci/facilities/paranal/instruments/gravity/overview.html

This episode is sort of "fan fiction" conversation with a dead man who will cast a shadow over physics, philosophy, and theology for decades to come: Steven Weinberg, co-recipient of the 1979 Nobel Prize. Long before audiobooks and podcasts were a thing, in 1992 I took a night train from Cleveland to Buffalo to Binghamton to meet my girlfriend. To while away the hours, I brought with me Weingberg's epochal popular science book, "The First Three Minutes". A few months later, as a graduation present, I received from Lawrence Krauss, CWRU's incoming physics department chairman, "Dreams of a Final Theory". “Weinberg” is the most mentioned name in my The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast notebook where I keep thoughts on possible/upcoming guests. I never got to host him on my show. I did try, most recently in February 2021. For a long time, I held off, insecure in my ability to bring anything new to the table. Weinberg was a brilliant scientist but as I show, had overly simplistic thoughts on religion and practitioners. Often he claimed science, at its best, SHOULD make religion less plausible. Using quotes drawn from his many interviews and lectures, including one in his own voice, I bring you this slightly combative interview with a very complex individual. For the record, Stephen Weinberg, Sheldon Glashow, and Abdus Salam shared the 1979 Nobel Prize for his work on Electroweak Symmetry Breaking or the, so-called, ‘Standard Model for particle physics'. He also made many contributions to both particle physics and cosmology. With respect to the latter, the question addressed is whether or why our universe is fine-tuned for our existence. Past guest, Lenny Susskind explained that Weinberg calculated that if the cosmological constant was just a little different, our universe would cease to exist. This paper is behind a paywall, but see a public lecture (with advanced math): https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Weinberg/Weinberg3.html. Weinberg believed the Anthropic Principle may be appropriated by cosmologists committed to nontheism, and refers to that Principle as a "turning point" in modern science because applying it to the string landscape "may explain how the constants of nature that we observe can take values suitable for life without being fine-tuned by a benevolent creator".  I cover some of Steven's ‘greatest hits' including: "I can hope that this long sad story, this progression of priests and ministers and rabbis and ulamas and imams and bonzes and bodhisattvas, will come to an end. I hope this is something to which science can contribute … it may be the most important contribution that we can make."  "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." "In our universe we are tuned into the frequency that corresponds to physical reality. But there are an infinite number of parallel realities coexisting with us in the same room, although we cannot tune into them."  And my personal ‘favorite':"It seems a bit unfair to my relatives to be murdered in order to provide an opportunity for free will for Germans, but even putting that aside, how does free will account for cancer? Is it an opportunity of free will for tumors?" So, let me know what you think of this episode. Should I do more solo episodes like this, or make this my one and only

Brian Schmidt, is an astronomer at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University, formerly known as Mount Stromlo and Siding Spring Observatories. He works in several areas of astronomy, most notably with exploding stars called supernovae. He also chases Gamma-Ray Bursts, and is heading a project to build a new Telescope that will map the Southern Sky called SkyMapper. Brian was awarded The Nobel Prize in Physics 2011 for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae. Please join my mailing list; just click here: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php

In February 2021 Dr. Barry Barish, co-recipient of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for the LIGO experiment, interviewed me at his home in Los Angeles. The topic was his thoughts and reactions to my book, Losing the Nobel Prize (http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA). We discussed scientific leadership, academic stress, burnout, the role of mentors and managers in science and a lot about my book too. Losing The Nobel Prize By Brian Keating 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.

In February 2021 Dr. Barry Barish, co-recipient of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for the LIGO experiment, interviewed me at his home in Los Angeles. The topic was his thoughts and reactions to my book, Losing the Nobel Prize (http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA). We discussed scientific leadership, academic stress, burnout, the role of mentors and managers in science and a lot about my book too. Losing The Nobel Prize By Brian Keating 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.

Dr. Brian Keating talks about his new book Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner. James and Brian discussed the traits of the Nobel Prize Winners, and what it means for them! James Altucher interviews the world's leading peak performers in every area of life. But instead of giving you the typical success story, James digs deeper to find the “Choose Yourself” story—these are the moments we relate to… when someone rises up from personal struggle to reinvent themselves. https://jamesaltucher.com/ Available on Amazon: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner  About Professor Brian Keating: https://www.youtube.com/drbriankeating Podcast in iTunes https://simonsobservatory.org/ https://briankeating.com/ https://bkeating.physics.ucsd.edu/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/drbriankeating/

Barry Barish is the Linde Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at Caltech and faculty member at UC Riverside. He became director of the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) project in 1997. In 2017, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics along with Rai Weiss and Kip Thorne and their teams “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.” Before joining the LIGO experiment, he worked on the Superconducting Super Collider, the high-profile particle accelerator that was canceled by Congress in 1993. He has many other awards, is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and served as president of the American Physical Society in 2011. Barry is a consummate scientist. He has the hands-on technical expertise, the interpersonal skills to motivate and lead, and the scientific discipline to know when to quit and went to double down.  Available on Amazon: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner  About Professor Brian Keating: https://www.youtube.com/drbriankeating Podcast in iTunes https://simonsobservatory.org/ https://briankeating.com/ https://bkeating.physics.ucsd.edu/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/drbriankeating/

Brian Keating: Author Hour Interview on Think Like A Nobel Prize Winner. Available on Amazon: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner  About Professor Brian Keating: https://www.youtube.com/drbriankeating Podcast in iTunes https://simonsobservatory.org/ https://briankeating.com/ https://bkeating.physics.ucsd.edu/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/drbriankeating/

John Mather is a senior astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and a professor of physics at the University of Maryland's College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. In 2006, he and George Smoot were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics “for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation.” The work, completed along with their teams, used the COBE satellite to all but confirm the Big Bang theory—and elevated cosmologists, individuals previously derided by “real” physicists as being “always in error, but never in doubt,” into proper practitioners of precision science.  Available on Amazon: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner  About Professor Brian Keating: https://www.youtube.com/drbriankeating Podcast in iTunes https://simonsobservatory.org/ https://briankeating.com/ https://bkeating.physics.ucsd.edu/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/drbriankeating/

Available on Amazon: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner  About Professor Brian Keating: https://www.youtube.com/drbriankeating Podcast in iTunes https://simonsobservatory.org/ https://briankeating.com/ https://bkeating.physics.ucsd.edu/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/drbriankeating/

Rai Weiss is a professor emeritus at MIT, where he also earned his undergraduate degree and PhD. He, along with Barry Barish and Kip Thorne, won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves,” work that was completed with the rest of their team of more than a thousand scientists, engineers, technicians, and managers. He has won numerous awards for his pioneering work on both the COBE (NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer) and LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) projects. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Physical Society, and many other professional societies. Weiss is a charming and consummate storyteller. His playful exuberance is incandescent. And I appreciate how forthright he is, as I think it is important to talk about the business of large projects and admit to the shortcomings rather than only discussing them with reverent worshipful praise. I admire that Weiss is relentlessly passionate even into his eighties. Just as a black hole shakes up space-time every few years, Weiss continues to pivot and switch direc- tion himself. It's impossible not to think that this tendency has been responsible for his continued fertility of mind. He is a big-picture thinker that loves to keep things fresh by shaking himself out of complacency.  Available on Amazon: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner About Professor Brian Keating: https://www.youtube.com/drbriankeating Podcast in iTunes https://simonsobservatory.org/ https://briankeating.com/ https://bkeating.physics.ucsd.edu/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/drbriankeating/

In 1979, Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam, and Steven Wein- berg were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics “for their contributions to the theory of the unified weak and elec- tromagnetic interaction between elementary particles....” Born in Manhattan in 1932 to Russian immigrant parents, he is now a professor emeritus of physics at Harvard University and professor emeritus of mathematics and physics at Boston University. Like a nexus, he's seemingly connected in one way or another to almost all of the amaz- ing physicists of the twentieth century, and as such has both created nucleation sites for ideas to flourish and also catalyzed other interactions whose effects are still being felt today. He is the classic figure of an American physicist and is allegedly the inspiration for the television character Shel- don Cooper on The Big Bang Theory. To be sure, Glashow is a bookish intellectual with a mischievous sense of humor. I admire that he is intellectually honest and rigorous but also playful and avuncular. He's cherished not least for his ability to describe the mysterious aspects of nature in a playful, delightful way. And all of his writings about science—including the wonderful book Interactions, published in 1988, which provided a pathway for the future of physics as he perceived it at the time—make room for the role of serendipity and luck in those discoveries that could never have been forecasted, no matter how many prizes a scientist might have won. He still has a sense of wonder in his late eighties.  Available on Amazon: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner  About Professor Brian Keating: https://www.youtube.com/drbriankeating Podcast in iTunes https://simonsobservatory.org/ https://briankeating.com/ https://bkeating.physics.ucsd.edu/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/drbriankeating/

Adam Riess is a distinguished professor of physics at Johns Hopkins University and an astronomer at the Space Tele- scope Science Institute. In 2011, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Brian Schmidt and Saul Perlmutter “for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae.”  The work— done by a team—was recognized almost immediately (in Nobel years, at least), making Adam one of the youngest winners ever of the physics prize at age 41. Though we are contemporaries, I consider Adam Riess a role model. His relentless pursuit of topics of great meaning is inspirational. In 2005, he and I competed in a worldwide competition to determine who is a worthy successor to the great physicist Charles Townsend, winner of the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics. I won first prize for my concept for the BICEP experiment—spoiler alert: I did not succeed in replicating Charlie Townsend's renown—and third place went to Adam Riess. On the day he won the Nobel Prize, my brother Kevin said, “Brian, you won the battle, but he won the war”—something only a big brother would say.  Available on Amazon: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner About Professor Brian Keating: https://www.youtube.com/drbriankeating Podcast in iTunes https://simonsobservatory.org/ https://briankeating.com/ https://bkeating.physics.ucsd.edu/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/drbriankeating/

Frank Wilczek is a physics professor at MIT, Arizona State University, and Stockholm University. He won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with David Gross and H. David Politzer, “for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction.” The work, which revolutionized quantum physics, was conducted thirty-one years prior, when Wilczek was a graduate student at Princeton. He has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has writ- ten multiple books, including A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design and Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality. We tend to respect things in other people that we either can't see in ourselves or see in ourselves but don't live up to. This is probably why I so admire Frank Wilczek's endurance and forbearance. Those qualities are incredibly rare in a scientist and are ones I struggle with personally. He had this almost stoic patience, to wait thirty-one years for recognition, knowing all the while that he would likely win the Nobel Prize, but not receiving it. He exhibited incredible grit and resiliency. And he never lost his cheerfulness! Throughout those years, he committed to the process, dedicated himself to his craft, and kept showing up, understanding that the award is not the final arbiter of success or even satisfaction. I've learned more from him about patience and determination even than I have about the inner workings of protons and quarks.  Available on Amazon: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner  About Professor Brian Keating: https://www.youtube.com/drbriankeating Podcast in iTunes https://simonsobservatory.org/ https://briankeating.com/ https://bkeating.physics.ucsd.edu/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/drbriankeating/

In 2020, Roger Penrose received the Nobel Prize in Physics “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity,” work he did along with his team in the 1960s. He is also a mathematician, philosopher, and the author of several books, including 1989's The Emperor's New Mind, an exploration of consciousness and quantum mechanics, which not only had a profound influence on me in my youth but is also part of why I chose to write a popular science book myself. (That Roger Penrose blurbed my book was a thrilling capstone.) Today, he is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, among many other distinctions. Not only is Roger Penrose relentlessly curious, but he's also fascinated by seemingly everything, from biology to black holes to consciousness. To the layperson, these might seem to all be similar esoteric theoretical activities, but to a physicist, they couldn't be more different. The fact that he can switch from a completely theoretical field, such as studies of the Big Bang, to a completely applicable one, like investigating the brain, is breathtaking to me. And he has had success in all of his fields. Most people's work is either deep or broad. Roger's is both. It's the result of an incredible work ethic, a thorough imagination, and sheer longevity. He was eighty-nine years old when he won the Nobel Prize in 2020 and is still going strong. He doesn't give up, even when people consider his ideas on the outskirts of possibility. I deeply admire and try to emulate that kind of maverick self-determination to go where your curiosity takes you and your passions drive you, even if it's heterodox.  Available on Amazon: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner  About Professor Brian Keating: https://www.youtube.com/drbriankeating Podcast in iTunes https://simonsobservatory.org/ https://briankeating.com/ https://bkeating.physics.ucsd.edu/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/drbriankeating/

Duncan Haldane is the Sherman Fairchild University Professor of Physics at Princeton University. In 2016, he, along with David J. Thouless and J. Michael Kosterlitz, received the Nobel Prize in Physics “for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter.” There are many remarkable things about Duncan Haldane, not least his devilishly delightful sense of humor and his ability to playfully take on the most complicated matters. I also admire his intellectual curiosity, humility, and persistence. He is deeply driven by a desire to understand the possibilities of strange—even borderline bizarre—new forms of matter. Despite it taking many decades for his prize-winning work to be confirmed, he never gave up on it. At the same time, though, he never assumed he was right or allowed himself to be swayed by the notion that his brilliance would lead to a revolution in physics—as it has. The very day he learned he'd won the Nobel Prize, he reminded us of what really matters: he went right back to teaching and researching.  Available on Amazon: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner  About Professor Brian Keating: https://www.youtube.com/drbriankeating Podcast in iTunes https://simonsobservatory.org/ https://briankeating.com/ https://bkeating.physics.ucsd.edu/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/drbriankeating/

Carl Wieman is a professor of physics at Stanford Uni- versity, professor in the Stanford Graduate School of Education, and a DRC professor in the Stanford Univer- sity School of Engineering. In 2001, he—along with Eric Allin Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle, and their teams—was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics “for the achievement of Bose–Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates.” He was also a recipient of the 2020 Yidan Prize for education research. His indefatigable work to revolutionize the way professors teach—and students learn—was the subject of our conver- sation. The first question I asked was, “If somebody says, ‘I have good news for you and bad news for you,' which do you want to hear first?” Without skipping a beat, he said he'd want the bad news because “it turns out negative feedback contributes much more to learning than positive feedback does.” Wieman himself is dedicated to continued learning. This is only one of the qualities I find so inspiring in him. We are all educators and leaders, just in different ways, jobs, and positions. And it is impossible to be a good educator and leader without also being a good student. As Carl argues, one of the things we have to learn is how to teach. The field of teaching needs better best practices. We need to work smarter, not harder. I admire the way Carl is now applying the same mental tenacity and clarity of purpose he used in the laboratory to his work in education. He realized that teaching is not dissimilar to the processes by which he conducted research—namely, that both are problem-solving exercises and involve certain hypotheses that need to be reexamined. As Carl points out, it's important to question assumptions and look at things in new ways. He argues that teachers have to be students and have to continue learning—and that they are not currently doing a good job of it. This is disruptive. The bad news: Carl equates current teaching styles to bloodletting. The good news: he doesn't think that teaching well will ultimately take much more time than we're currently spending.  Available on Amazon: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner About Professor Brian Keating: https://www.youtube.com/drbriankeating Podcast in iTunes https://simonsobservatory.org/ https://briankeating.com/ https://bkeating.physics.ucsd.edu/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/drbriankeating/