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
Author
Big Bang Productions Inc.
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Podcast website
Latest episode
Jul 11, 2026
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Episodes
Fundamentally Closer to Truth? A conversation with Deepak Chopra, Leonard Mlodinow, & Frank Wilczek (#108) 06.01.2021 1:27:02
Does your mind create matter? What happens when an irresistible force meets an unmovable object? What is the nature of free will? Find out, in this special episode of the Into the Impossible Podcast in collaboration with Deepak Chopra’s “Chopra Well”. Fundamentals: Closer to Truth: A Look at the work of Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek and physicists Leonard Mlodinow and Brian Keating. In this rivetin...
Lord Martin Rees On The Future (#107) 06.01.2021 1:38:07
Lord Martin Rees has played a huge role in my career and is an inspiration to me and millions of scientists around the world. There is literally nothing beyond his purview and our conversation bore this out — we covered everything from A to Z: artificial intelligence to zoology! Nothing was off-limits — we even shared our mutual and controversial distaste for alchemy and astrology! Lord Rees of Lu...
(part 2): Max Tegmark & Eric Weinstein in Conversation (#106) 01.01.2021 1:12:37
Max Tegmark and Eric Weinstein chat on the last day of 2020! Let’s say ‘good riddance’ with good friends and great conversation! We’ll talk a bit about Artificial Intelligence, Theories of Everything & the seemingly impossible challenge of building a positive future for humanity. Max thinks that, by improving the news we receive with the aid of machine learning, we can achieve a brighter future. C...
(part 1): Max Tegmark & Eric Weinstein in Conversation (#106) 01.01.2021 1:19:52
Max Tegmark and Eric Weinstein chat on the last day of 2020! Let’s say ‘good riddance’ with good friends and great conversation! We’ll talk a bit about Artificial Intelligence, Theories of Everything & the seemingly impossible challenge of building a positive future for humanity. Max thinks that, by improving the news we receive with the aid of machine learning, we can achieve a brighter future. C...
Nobel Prize Winner Rainer Weiss: Feeling Spacetime Shudder: Black Holes, Gravitational Waves and Nobel Prizes! (#105) 29.12.2020 1:54:34
MIT Physics Professor Emeritus Rainer Weiss won a 1/2 share of The Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 For his contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves. He was born in Berlin, where his father was a doctor and psychoanalyst and his mother an actress. His father was of Jewish descent, and the family fled Nazism to the United States. After schooling in New York, Weiss st...
Cumrun Vafa: Puzzles to Unlock The Universe! (#104) 25.12.2020 1:13:17
Join me in welcoming Prof. Cumrun Vafa (Harvard) in his first major podcast interview! We discussed a wide range of topics including what message he’d put into a billion-year time capsule. Plus, we discuss his delightful new book. Beneath all of the complex and formidable mathematical structures that formulate physical laws rest simple but deep nuggets of truth. It is these simple truths, and not...
Jill Tarter – Proxima Centauri, the Drake Equation, and SETI in 2021! (#103) 23.12.2020 1:06:43
Last week the Guardian and Scientific American announced that Breakthrough Listen astronomers using the Parkes radio telescope in Australia saw a weird radio signal coming from Proxima Centauri, the star system closest to Earth. The signal behaves strangely, only using a narrow 982MHz band typically not used by human-made spacecraft. It also does not correspond to known natural processes. The freq...
Eric Weinstein – Ask Me Anything Live (#102) 22.12.2020 1:21:44
Eric Weinstein is the managing director of Thiel Capital, Peter Thiel‘s investment firm, a position he has held since 2015. Though not an academic physicist, he proposed a unified theory of physics in 2013. He and his brother Bret Weinstein coined the term Intellectual Dark Web to refer to an informal group of pundits. Weinstein received his Ph. D. in mathematical physics from the Mathematics Depa...
Nobel Prizewinner Frank Wilczek: Beautiful Questions, God, Nobels, Imposters & the Power of Beauty (#101) 17.12.2020 1:39:09
Does the universe embody beautiful ideas? Join me on a cosmic journey with Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek. We will embark on a voyage of related discoveries, from Plato and Pythagoras up to the present. Wilczek’s groundbreaking work in quantum physics was inspired by his intuition to look for a deeper order of beauty in nature. This is the deep logic of the universe—and it is no accident that it is...
Barry Barish – Black Holes, Nobel Prizes & The Imposter Syndrome (#100) 15.12.2020 1:26:36
Barry Barish is an emeritus professor at Caltech, where he has worked since 1963. He became director of the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) project in 1997, which led to his Nobel Prize in 2017. He has many other awards and is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and American Physical Society, of which he was also president. Barry joins our Nobel Minds playlist o...
Sheldon Glashow: The Power of Useless Ideas! (#099) 03.12.2020 1:32:39
Sheldon Glashow is a theoretical physicist and emeritus professor at Harvard, where he also earned his Ph. D. He was the first to propose a grand unified theory and also worked as a visiting scientist at CERN. Glashow shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg. He is a member of the Board of Sponsors for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. It was an honor to have Sh...
Bill Perkins: Winners DIE WITH ZERO! (#098) 28.11.2020 1:06:17
We all have limited time on Earth, so how should we spend it? Financial advisors urge us to be more like the ant than the grasshopper: work hard to maximize our earnings, save early and often, and, in retirement, reap the fruits of our labors and the rewards of compound interest. “What a monumental waste of human life,” says multi- millionaire Bill Perkins. If you spend a lifetime working and die...
Eric Weinstein: Imposter Syndrome, Donald Trump, & the Future of Theoretical Physics (#097) 28.11.2020 1:40:02
Eric Weinstein joins me live to take your questions about the past, present and future of physics. We’ll discuss my recent chats with Lenny Susskind, Shelly Glashow, and Barry Barish and Eric’s recent podcasts with Lex Fridman too. Eric and Stephen Wolfram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Join us in the chat room to ask questions! Previously featured: Eric Weinstein:...
Paul Sutter – How To Die In Space (#096) 20.11.2020 49:34
Paul M. Sutter is a research professor in astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University and a guest researcher at the Flatiron Institute in New York City. Paul earned his PhD in physics in 2011 as a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellow at the University of Illinois. He then spent three years at the Paris Institute for Astrophysics...
Evan Carmichael: What Is Your One Word? (#095) 20.11.2020 30:57
Evan Carmichael believes in entrepreneurs. At 19, he built then sold a biotech software company. At 22, he was a venture capitalist helping to raise $500,000 to $15 million. He now runs EvanCarmichael.com, a popular website for entrepreneurs. He breathes and bleeds entrepreneurship. He’s obsessed, aiming to help one billion entrepreneurs and change the world. He has set two world records, uses a s...
Lenny Susskind: Black Hole War My BATTLE w Stephen Hawking Made the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics (#094) 19.11.2020 1:27:36
The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics is a 2008 popular science book by American theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind. The book covers the black hole information paradox, and the related scientific dispute between Stephen Hawking and Susskind. Susskind is known for his work on string theory and wrote a previous popular science book, The C...
Janna Levin: How to Survive A Black Hole Encounter! (#093) 14.11.2020 59:45
Janna is back to discuss her wonderful new book, BLACK HOLE SURVIVAL GUIDE https://amzn.to/2IlbpKS Keep your distance and enjoy the ride! Please subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 & watch my previous conversation with Janna: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEtGYQ7A0B4?sub_confirmation=1 Leave a comment in the comment section or join the livechat…we all want to enga...
Clifford Will and Nicolas Yunes: Is Einstein Still Right? (#092) 13.11.2020 1:01:01
Albert Einstein is often viewed as the icon of #genius, and his theories are admired for their beauty and correctness. Yet the final judge of any theory is the rigorous test of experiment, not the fame of its inventor or the allure of its mathematics. For decades, general relativity has passed test after test with flying colors, including some remarkable new tests using the recently detected gravi...
Astronomy’s Great Debate – The Nature of the Universe and the Future of Astronomy! (#091) 13.11.2020 1:41:40
Host of Into The Impossible Professor Brian Keating, David Spergel, Janna Levin, Sara Seager, Wendy Freedman, & Nobel Prize winner Adam Riess debate the hottest topics in modern astronomy while celebrating the Hubble Space Telescope’s 30th birthday! An all-star (get it??) party featuring observations of Hubble’s ‘greatest hits’, courtesy of Wyoming Stargazing Association! Plus we debated the great...
Sir Roger Penrose: Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, Black Holes Nobel Prize w/ Eric Weinstein Janna Levin (#090) 09.11.2020 2:22:36
Join me for a very special discussion with Sir Roger Penrose, co-winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics. We will discuss Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, Black Holes, and of course, Nobel Prizes! GET OUR SLIDES: https://kingsumo.com/g/vn03wc/sir-roger-penrose-on-the-into-the-impossible-podcast-slides Sir Roger Penrose is co-winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics. We discuss Conformal Cyclic Cosmo...
Marwa El-Diwiny: Using Soft Robotics to Solve Hard Problems (#089) 08.11.2020 59:26
Marwa A.ElDiwiny, an early stage researcher PhD, working on modelling and simulating self-healing soft materials for industrail applications at VUB. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Seth Godin: How Creatives use The Practice to make great art, overcome fear & thrive on constraints! (#088) 06.11.2020 36:48
Seth Godin is a prolific writer, thinker, and self-declared “non-guru” guru to millions around the world. He invented email marketing. He started the AltMBA program. He has written 20 books, including the Practice. He thinks deeply about the way ideas spread whether these be née notions in quantum physics, science fiction, entrepreneurship, leadership, and–most of all- marketing. He’s worked with...
Unni Turrettini: Betraying the Nobel: Secrets, Corruption, and the World’s Most Prestigious Prize (#087) 04.11.2020 43:32
Betraying the Nobel: Secrets, Corruption, and the World’s Most Prestigious Prize! This was a fascinating interview for me to conduct, with a ‘sister-in-arms” who is rallying the world to restore Alfred Nobel’s lofty vision for the Peace Prize. Unni wrote The Mystery of the Lone Wolf Killer and comes back with a powerful shot across the bow of the Nobel Peace Prize: BETRAYING THE NOBEL! I was honor...
Gentry Patrick: Race & Diversity in Science (#086) 30.10.2020 1:10:45
Race and diversity issues in STEM can no longer be ignored. Professor Gentry Patrick is a neurobiologist and the Director of Mentorship and Diversity at UC San Diego. As a kid from Compton, he didn’t have an easy road, but he is committed to making sure future generations have it easier than he did. We discussed the importance of diversity in science and academia and the unfair burden placed on pe...
How Big is the Universe? It’s Debatable… An Essay By Brian Keating (#085) 27.10.2020 7:48
The GREATEST Debate: How two astronomers changed the way humanity debates By April 1920, the Spanish flu had claimed 50,000,000 lives. The first World War ended only 17 months earlier. A polarizing presidential election was underway. On April 26, 1920, in Washington DC, two contestants took the stage in a debate that would alter the cosmos forever. Was this contest the 1920 presidential debate? No...
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