Big Bang Productions Inc.
Into the Impossible With Brian Keating
Think like a physicist. Wonder like a human. Into the Impossible is where Cosmic Conversations happen — uniting Nobel Prize winners, iconoclasts, authors, and technologists to explore reality’s deepest questions. From AI to aliens, from biophysics to the brain, from the cosmos to the multiverse, Brian Keating, Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego covers it all. If you’ve ever asked What’s out there? or What’s next? , this is where curiosity meets clarity. Learn to think like this. 🎙 Full episodes, notes & more: briankeating.com/podcast
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Big Bang Productions Inc.
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Podcast website
Latest episode
Jul 11, 2026
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Episodes
Love & Math: Edward Frenkel (#281) 21.12.2022 1:02:06
Edward Frenkel’s latest book Love and Math, a New York Times bestseller, was named one of the Best Books of the year by both Amazon and iBooks, and won the Euler Book Prize from the Mathematical Association of America. The book reveals a side of math seldom seen, suffused with all the beauty and elegance of a work of art. Mathematics, he writes, directs the flow of the universe, lurks behind its s...
Replay - Who Was James Webb? An honest conversation with Hakeem Oluseyi (#280) 20.12.2022 55:54
This is a replay of the discussion with Hakeem Oluseyi on the controversy surrounding the naming of the James Webb Space Telescope. It continues! Today the New York Time published an opinion piece entitled: How Naming the James Webb Telescope Turned Into a Fight Over Homophobia: Did the former head of NASA discriminate against gay people? One physicist tried to rebut the accusation, only to find h...
Follow Science, Not Scientists: Jay Bhattacharya (#279) 14.12.2022 1:34:12
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research. He directs Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. Dr. Bhattacharya’s research focuses on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations, with a particular emphasis on the role of government programs, biomedical innovati...
Jim Tour: Darwin's Deception!? (#278) 11.12.2022 45:01
James (Jim) Tour is a renowned chemist and nanotechnologist and is the T.T. and W.F. Chao Professor of Chemistry, Comp. Sci., Materials Science & NanoEngineering, at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He conducts research at the Smalley-Curl Institute & NanoCarbon Center. Dr. Tour has been the source of many well-publicized debates on and offline, including with Prof. Lee Cronin: Are we close to d...
Balaji Srinivasan: The Network State Is Eternal (#277) 04.12.2022 1:43:32
Balaji S. Srinivasan is an American entrepreneur and investor. He holds a Ph. D. from Stanford university and sports several high scale financial successes; he was the co-founder of Counsyl, the former Chief Technology Officer of Coinbase, and former general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. twitter.com/balajis www.amazon.com/Network-State-How-Start-Country-ebook/dp/B09VPKZR...
Francis Halzen: Catching Neutrinos at the South Pole (#276) 30.11.2022 1:30:06
Francis Halzen is the Hilldale and Gregory Breit Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University Wisconsin-Madison and principal investigator for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, the world's largest neutrino detector, he is the Director of the Institute for Elementary Particle Physics, and the Hilldale and Gregory Breit Distinguished Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A theore...
The SCIENCE of ALIENS: Garry Nolan & Avi Loeb (#275) 25.11.2022 2:13:12
Garry Nolan is a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. His research is in microbiology, immunology, bio-computation, and analysis of UFO artifacts, materials, and he is actively investigating reports of UFO encounters. Avi Loeb is an astrophysicist at Harvard, the director of the Galileo Project, and the author of Extraterrestrial. In 1993 he moved to Harvard University where he was...
Cosmic Insignificance Therapy (#274) 24.11.2022 14:49
Just a few thoughts on 'cosmic insignificance therapy', popularized in the book "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals" Oliver Burkeman, brought to my attention in this blog post by Tim Ferriss https://tim.blog/2021/12/15/the-liberation-of-cosmic-insignificance-therapy/, with some additional thoughts on the philosophy of Sam Harris and Scott Galloway as well. I hope you enjoy and I than...
Niall Ferguson: DOOM! (#273) 20.11.2022 1:19:33
Niall Ferguson’s most recent book is Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. In this book he posits that disasters are inherently hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, and financial crises. and wars, are not normally distributed; there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe. But when disaster strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when...
Bernardo Kastrup: Consciousness & Superdeterminism Doubts (#272) 13.11.2022 1:23:24
Bernardo Kastrup is the executive director of Essentia Foundation. His work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essentially mental. He has a Ph. D. in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another Ph. D. in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence). As a scientist, Bernardo has worked for the European O...
Can Science Save Us? Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees (#271) 08.11.2022 1:49:35
In his most recent book If Science is to Save Us, Astronomer Royal Martin Rees argues that, in his expert and personal analysis of the scientific endeavor on which we all depend, that we need to think globally, we need to think rationally and we need to think long-term, empowered by twenty-first-century technology but guided by values that science alone cannot provide. In this timely work, Lord Re...
Mat Kaplan of Planetary Radio introduces a New Host and Interviews Brian Keating for an Update on The Simons Observatory (#270) 02.11.2022 21:58
Join host Mat Kaplan as he proudly introduces the person who will take on the show he created 20 years ago. Then we’ll join astrophysicist Brian Keating at a joyful gathering of cosmologists who hope to reveal secrets of the Universe through the new Simons Observatory. You might win Brian’s new book about thinking like a Nobel Prize winner in the What’s Up space trivia contest. There’s more to dis...
P-hacking, Reproducibility & the Nobel Prize: Guido Imbens (#269) 30.10.2022 2:08:17
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 201...
Fraser Cain: Let’s Find Aliens in Our Solar System! (#268) 26.10.2022 1:31:53
Join me and Fraser Cain (https://www.youtube.com/c/universetodayvids) for a wide-ranging romp through the Universe of ideas! We'll take questions and hopefully answer a few. Don't miss this chance to chat with a legend! @FraserCain Space and astronomy news comes fresh three times weekly from Fraser Cain, publisher of Universe Today and co-host of Astronomy Cast. If you're a fan of space, sci-fi,...
Chaos, Covid, & Climate Change with Professor Tim Palmer (#267) 18.10.2022 1:53:51
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...
70K BK AMA Q &A! (#266) 12.10.2022 1:05:58
Welcome to my first AMA! Let me know If I should do a part 2! Jay Yow asks Will 👽 aliens look like me?? I reader312: What is your most recommended book (based around physics and engineering) for a student that is going to university next year? Prometheus Warp X: What happens to spacetime near an ultra-intense ion ring azimuthally accelerated towards c while compressed towards zero radius? Bob Kur...
A Brief History of Time Nobel Prizewinner Bill Phillips (#265) 09.10.2022 1:31:03
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,...
Genesis & The Big Bang: Are They Compatible? (#264) 07.10.2022 1:19:58
Be sure to watch the video version of this episode with slides here: https://youtu.be/F3P1ZtLZd9s Genesis & The Big Bang “If You Can Count the Stars, A Jewish Astronomer’s Journey! Think back to the late-night dorm room discussions from your college days. We are going to talk about cosmology, the Big Bang, and more from two perspectives, from the perspective of an astrophysicist and the perspectiv...
Many Worlds & the Multiverse: Andy Friedman, David Brin (#263) 07.10.2022 53:56
How many Multiverses are there? Featuring @davidBrin & the late, great Andy Friedman, colleague of the 2022 co-recipient of the @NobelPrize, Anton Zeilinger. Let me know your favorite takeaway from this chat about the profligate nature of the Multiverse. Find Andy's website here https://asfriedman.physics.ucsd.edu Watch the video here: https://youtu.be/9oahwWBcg1A Connect with me: 🏄♂️ Twitter: h...
Neil Turok: Most Theorists are WRONG! (#262) 02.10.2022 2:22:02
Renowned physicist Neil Turok, Holder of the Higgs Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of Edinburgh, joins me to discuss the state of science and the universe. Neil Turok has been director emeritus of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics since 2019. He specializes in mathematical physics and early-universe physics, including the cosmological constant and a cyclic model for th...
The State of The Universe With Eric Weinstein (#261) 27.09.2022 1:32:21
A conversation from the vault, back in Spring 2022. As relevant as ever, hear Eric's thoughts on sundry topics such as: The twin nuclei and the unleashing of great power Harry Truman vs Kamala Harris. The problems with our leadership. Distinguishing between "complicated" and "complex". Keating's pedagogy. What happened on September 12th, 2001? Are we in a death spiral? The acceleration of science...
Did the Big Bang Happen? Brian Keating on The Morning Wire (#260) 21.09.2022 15:01
Newly released photos from the James Webb Space Telescope have allowed scientists to view farther into space, and farther into the past, than ever before. The images emerging are raising questions about the origins of our universe. One viral article from independent scientist Eric Lerner made the rounds on social media in recent weeks with its provocative claim that the Big Bang never happened. We...
Sean Carroll’s Biggest Ideas (#259) 20.09.2022 1:28:26
Sean Carroll joins me to discuss his magnificent new book, The Biggest Ideas In the Universe. Sean is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, gravity, and cosmology. He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He has been a contributor to the physics blog Cosmic Variance, and has published in scientifi...
Proving the Big Bang Happened with Dr Brian Keating on The Fraser Cain Show (#258) 18.09.2022 1:13:15
Fraser Cain, science youtuber and publisher www.universetoday.com interviews Dr. Brian Keating. They discussed the evidence for the Big Bang and the impact of James Webb Space Telescope on our current understanding of the Universe. See the video version here. www.universetoday.com Connect with me: 🏄♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating ...
Brian Keating on the Abhijit Chavda Podcast: Big Bang Theory, Alien Life, Cosmology, and the Nobel Prize (#257) 11.09.2022 1:12:10
Brian is interviewed by Abhijit Chavda. Abhijit is a theoretical physicist, technologist, writer and host of the #AskAbhijit podcast and youtube channel. His work in theoretical physics involves research on the topics of dark matter, dark energy, black hole physics, quantum gravity and physical cosmology. He has authored and co-authored several research papers on these topics. He discusses a varie...
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