A physics professor ran the energy budget on the Nimitz tic-tac. The maneuver needs about a thousand gigawatts, more than ten times every nuclear plant in the United States combined.

Nothing we build survives its own waste heat at that scale. So what was flying?

Kevin Knuth is a professor of physics at the University at Albany and a former NASA scientist who now applies Bayesian statistics to UAP sensor data.

We cover: why a 5,400 g maneuver would turn a pilot into soup, where the energy went when the object stopped and no explosion followed, the 1954 radar measurements nobody wants to talk about, the New Zealand frigate that went dark and adrift in three seconds, and why the records from that deployment stay classified until 2062.

Knuth says the power numbers alone rule out human technology. I push back on whether the sensors agree.

Newsletter, full transcript, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: briankeating.com/aliens

CHAPTERS

• 00:00 Why this field needs gatekeepers

• 03:50 How anomalous is anomalous?

• 06:40 The UFO photo that was a seagull

• 10:40 Radar clocked them at 19 km/s in 1954

• 15:00 5,400 g and a body weighing 227 tonnes

• 19:00 The radar return problem he had not considered

• 21:45 A gigawatt of waste heat and nowhere to put it

• 24:30 The 747 chased by something carrier sized

• 29:00 Why a number without an error bar is worthless

• 34:30 The NASA job he was not qualified for

• 37:00 Proxima Centauri in a day and a half

• 41:00 The warship that lost all power in 3 seconds

• 46:30 Pushing a column of water that cannot compress

• 48:45 The light that burned bark off the trees

• 53:00 What the power numbers rule out

• 56:00 The 95 percent problem

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This episode is sponsored by Abacus AI agent: agent.abacus.ai/keating

I fed it Carlo's recent papers and asked for the argument, the counterargument, and the evidence that would support or refute each side. Some of the questions and animations in this interview came out of that. It runs the top frontier models in one place, turns a dense PDF into a research report or a presentation with charts, builds interactive dashboards off a spreadsheet, and takes API access if you want it wired into your own tools.

Plans start at $10 a month. My link gets you the first month for $7: agent.abacus.ai/keating

The physicist who built loop quantum gravity says the second law does not say what you were taught it says, and that freedom does not require breaking a single law of nature. Order builds itself. Your head is older than your feet. And neither one is the strangest thing here.

Carlo Rovelli founded the loop quantum gravity program and wrote the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics.

We cover: why oil separating from water is not a violation of entropy, what Galileo got wrong about the one discovery he is most famous for, the paper Einstein published denying gravitational waves, why a chess program that deliberates tells you what your own freedom actually is, and what Rovelli would build with ten years and unlimited money.

“To imagine that to be free you have to violate the laws of nature is stupid.” — Carlo Rovelli

CHAPTERS

00:00 Your head is older than your feet

00:48 Things left alone get ordered. Who ordered them?

07:00 Low entropy might be about you, not the universe

08:38 You can be in two cities at once, just not to you

11:02 Why start with Galileo when Einstein knew more?

19:34 Galileo misunderstood his own discovery

22:32 Einstein published a paper denying gravitational waves

25:08 The definition of time that explains nothing

26:50 Two clocks, two metres apart, two answers

31:06 Nothing gets recorded without something being lost

33:12 The chess program deliberates. So do you.

37:06 Can a machine have Einstein’s happiest thought?

39:52 Thirty minutes versus a month

44:10 Dark matter made of black holes the size of a hair

51:10 Ten years, unlimited money, a room full of junctions

Rovelli told me the second law does not say what I was taught it says. Order builds itself. Transcript, bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt

Three moments worth the rewatch: 07:00 The entropy you were taught is a point of view 26:50 Why your head is older than your feet 39:52 The thing Claude did in 30 minutes

Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt

Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu

Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1

Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating

Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join

Featured Guest: Carlo Rovelli website: https://www.cpt.univ-mrs.fr/~rovelli/

The Relational Universe (book): https://www.amazon.com/dp/0735216118

Carlo Rovelli on Twitter/X: https://x.com/carlorovelli

My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un

Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast

#CarloRovelli #freewill #entropy #physics #quantumgravity #briankeating #intotheimpossible

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They Built the Quietest Place on Earth to Find Dark Matter

One event in 220 days. That is what the search for dark matter looks like right now.

In this episode I talk with Rick Gaitskell, professor of physics at Brown University and a leader on the LZ dark matter experiment, about what it takes to build a detector that can see almost nothing at all: seven tonnes of liquid xenon, a mile of rock in an old gold mine, and shielding so careful that the radon seeping out of ordinary concrete counts as a serious enemy. We get into why the field spent decades hunting the WIMP, what happens to a 3.4 sigma result when you look at it honestly, and why a single event, however beautiful, cannot tell you what you want it to tell you.

We also talk about the human side of a project like this. The grad student who waited nine years for data. The physicist who walked away from investment banking. The uncomfortable fact that something like ninety-five percent of research does not work out, and what keeps people going anyway.

And the line that sits under all of it: we only get one damn universe, and nature does not care whether your theory is beautiful.

Chapters

• 00:00 One event in 220 days
• 06:00 Why they named it a WIMP
• 13:00 Ninety-five percent of research fails
• 20:00 He left investment banking for this
• 23:00 You are less than five percent of the universe
• 30:00 The fifty-year-old idea nobody can kill
• 45:00 The grad student who waited nine years
• 58:00 A gold mine and the quietest place on Earth
• 1:06:00 The radon in your basement is the enemy
• 1:21:00 The assumption that was hiding the signal
• 1:32:00 The event, and why they will not call it blinded
• 1:40:00 How 3.4 sigma becomes 2.6
• 1:49:00 The fog nobody can scrub
• 1:56:00 The dark matter we detected in 1956

My books

• Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir)
• Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner
• Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner
• Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook)

Socials

• Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating
• Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com
• Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog
• Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast

#intotheimpossible #briankeating #RickGaitskell #darkmatter #physics #AI #emergence #podcast

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For 50 years I taught my students that dark matter surrounds the Milky Way in a giant halo, or that Newton’s laws break down at low accelerations. The Gaia satellite just measured something that makes both of those answers uncomfortable. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation.

Gaia has measured over a billion stars. What its third data release shows is that the outer rotation curve of our own galaxy appears to decline in a Keplerian fashion. That should not happen if a dark matter halo is doing what we think it does. It also should not happen if MOND is right, because MOND produces flat curves for isolated galaxies. Both camps predicted something flatter. Neither got it.

I walk you through the physics from Kepler to Vera Rubin to Gaia DR3, show you why systematic errors from asymmetric drift, the Large Magellanic Cloud, and the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy matter enormously before anyone draws a conclusion, and lay out the three scenarios that still survive. The most interesting question here is not which side lost. It is why both sides were expecting the wrong curve from our own galaxy.

What you’ll hear:

-Why the neutrino technically counts as dark matter and why that still leaves most of the problem unsolved

-What Kepler’s first law of fatherhood has to do with galactic dynamics

-Why Stacy McGaugh and Mordehai Milgrom might be celebrating too soon

-What Cepheids, stellar streams, and globular clusters could tell us that Gaia cannot

-Whether the Milky Way is too messy to ever give us a clean answer

“The question is not which camp won, but why we were both expecting the wrong curve.” — Brian Keating

CHAPTERS

00:00 Two solutions. One problem. Neither wins.

02:12 What Vera Rubin actually found

03:18 We're inside the galaxy. That's the problem.

04:24 The asymmetric drift problem

05:04 What Gaia DR3 actually shows

06:34 Why the mass estimate is model-dependent

08:04 MOND: no radius, no problem. Until now.

08:56 Gaia may be saying both sides are wrong

09:24 Flaws lead to new laws

10:22 LMC, Sagittarius, and the galactic warp

12:28 Three viable explanations

12:42 Dark matter adjusts. MOND adjusts. But is that enough?

13:14 What could settle this

14:04 Are we expecting the wrong curve?

Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt

Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu

Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1

Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating

Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join

Related episodes:

Stacy McGaugh episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnpyFk2WlME

My books:

Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA

Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu

Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U

Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un

Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating

Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com

Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog

Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast

#darkmatter #MOND #MilkyWay #cosmology #briankeating #intotheimpossible #physics

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Did OpenAI just solve Navier–Stokes—and what would that actually mean for AGI?

Emad Mostaque joins Brian Keating LIVE to examine the claimed breakthrough, what would count as a verified solution, and whether AI solving a major mathematical problem changes the debate about intelligence—or control.

Watch my explainer about AI and the Navier-Stokes problem, including insights from Terry Tao https://youtu.be/je9X59psm6U?si=wGbcLhXmf47jeCHL?sub_confirmation=1

A convincing answer isn’t necessarily a proof. A mathematical breakthrough isn’t automatically AGI. But if this claim holds up, how much should we update our expectations?

Emad helped bring Stable Diffusion to the world and signed the letter calling for a pause on frontier AI development. In his previous conversation with Brian and AI safety researcher Roman Yampolskiy, he questioned how such a pause could work—and highlighted swarm intelligence as a particularly dangerous and unpredictable risk.

Now we return to the question underneath the excitement: if AI’s capabilities are accelerating, is our ability to understand and control them keeping up?

ON THE TABLE:

• • What exactly is being claimed about Navier–Stokes?

• • What separates a proposed solution from an accepted mathematical proof?

• • If the result holds up, does it demonstrate AGI—or something narrower?

• • Can AI produce discoveries that humans struggle to verify?

• • What would this change about open-source AI and the argument for a pause?

• • Are we watching the wrong risk: a single superintelligence, or swarms of AI agents?

• • What evidence would change Emad’s mind?

Bring your questions. We’ll examine the claim, the evidence, and what follows if it’s right.

This livestream discusses a claimed result; it does not assume the Millennium Prize Problem has been resolved.

FEATURED GUEST:

• Emad Mostaque on Twitter/X: https://x.com/EMostaque

• I.I.I. Inc.: https://ii.inc/

• Stable Diffusion / Stability AI: https://stability.ai/

Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt

Have a .edu email and live in the USA? Claim your meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu

Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1

Support Into the Impossible on Patreon for unfiltered bonus content and live monthly Office Hours: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating

Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join

MY BOOKS:

• Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA

• Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu

• Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U

• Galileo’s Dialogue audiobook: https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un

CONNECT WITH BRIAN:

• Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating

• Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com

• Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog

• Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast

#OpenAI #NavierStokes #AGI #EmadMostaque #ArtificialIntelligence #BrianKeating #IntoTheImpossible

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The man who open-sourced the most-used AI image model in history sat down with the man who has spent a decade proving superintelligence cannot be controlled. Brian set up a debate. What emerged was something more unsettling than any debate. Roman Yampolskiy is the computer scientist who coined the term AI safety and author of AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable. Emad Mostaque is the co-founder of Stable Diffusion and the only AI CEO who signed the pause letter. He now says he doesn’t know how a pause could work. Yampolskiy thinks that is the only option left. The question underneath everything is simple: if you have a 50% chance of wiping out civilization and you build it anyway, what are you actually doing? We cover what AI safety researchers actually think the danger is, why nobody has published a paper, filed a patent, or shipped a prototype for controlling a superintelligence, what the Qwen weights being out means for the pause argument, and why Mostaque thinks swarm intelligence is the most dangerous and most unpredictable risk vector we have. What you’ll hear: -Why both guests think P(doom) tells you less than you’d hope -What it means that no company, no lab, and no team has a patent on controlling superintelligence -Why the models the public receives are slightly lobotomized -The difference between an AI swarm and the ASI everyone is debating -Why giving every psychopath access to a cutting-edge intelligence weapon is incoherent safety strategy -What it would actually take to update Yampolskiy’s assessment “We either do it, or we die. There is nothing for you to gain by doing it.” — Roman Yampolskiy CHAPTERS 00:00 A debate that wasn't a debate 00:36 Turing test, AGI, superintelligence: where are we? 02:02 The open source argument nobody wins 03:32 Pause frontier AI forever. Which button? 05:04 P(doom): parameterizing our ignorance 09:02 Nukes are inefficient. AI isn't. 11:46 The lobotomized model problem 18:04 Decade-old problems solved weekly now 26:18 We either do it or we die 31:10 Stop the training or stop the funders 33:34 Lipstick on a Shoggoth 35:50 No paper. No patent. No framework. 39:42 Train only on what you need 44:14 What lowers Mostaque's p(doom)? 52:00 Same future. Two perspectives. Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Featured Guests: Roman Yampolskiy on Twitter/X: https://x.com/romanyam?lang=en AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable (book): https://www.amazon.com/dp/103257626X MIRI: https://intelligence.org Emad Mostaque on Twitter/X: https://x.com/EMostaque I.I.I. Inc.: https://ii.inc/ Stable Diffusion: https://stability.ai/ My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #AIrisk #aisafety #stablediffusion #RomanYampolskiy #EmadMostaque #briankeating #intotheimpossible

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I joined Peter McCormack to dig into one of the deepest unanswered questions in physics: what is time, and why does it only seem to move in one direction? My answer might surprise you. Time may not be a fundamental feature of reality at all, and understanding space, matter, and energy still doesn't mean we understand the universe itself.

We cover:

• - What may have existed before the Big Bang

• - Why something can't truly come from nothing

• - How my work with the Simons Observatory could detect gravitational waves from the universe's earliest moments

• - What dark matter actually means

• - Why even a film as detail-obsessed as Interstellar still gets the physics wrong.

The conversation then turns from cosmic time to human time: mortality, family, meaning, and attention. We get into UFO disclosure, the collapse of institutional trust, and whether AI can ever reproduce the embodied human insight that let Einstein transform physics. My take: AI remains a tool built to serve humanity, and it's time we stop apologizing for humanity's greatness.

———

📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt

🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu

🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1

🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating

⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join

📚 My books:

• Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA

• Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu

• Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U

• Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un

🌐 More:

• 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrianKeating

• 📚 Substack https://briankeating.substack.com/ss

• ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog

• 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast

#intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe

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The same mathematics that explains why a fridge magnet sticks to your refrigerator also explains why neural networks work when they have no right to. His group did the calculation. Nobody else had. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation.

Goldenfeld is a Professor of Physics at UC San Diego, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences who spent 36 years at the University of Illinois applying condensed matter physics to problems everyone else had given up on: why the genetic code is optimal, why early life evolved impossibly fast, and why AI works despite being overparameterized beyond anything classical statistics can explain.

The thread connecting all three is one idea: that what emerges from many things together is qualitatively different from the sum of its parts. That idea explains magnetism, AI, the origin of the genetic code, and why life may be inevitable wherever the laws of physics apply. He also argues that what is happening to science right now is not a disagreement about facts but a fracture in how people decide what is true, and that is a more dangerous problem.

What you’ll hear:

-Why the same phase transition that explains magnetism also explains why AI works at all

-Why Francis Crick concluded life must have come from outer space and what Goldenfeld found instead

-What horizontal gene transfer has to do with how libraries work

-Why Goldenfeld thinks Enceladus is a better bet for life than Europa

-The purpose of life, stated as a thermodynamics problem

-Why “different is more” is more useful than “more is different”

“The impact you make is the ratio of what you do divided by what everybody else does. Minimize the denominator.” — Nigel Goldenfeld

CHAPTERS

00:00 AI shouldn't work. It does.

00:56 What is a phase transition?

03:10 What the renormalization group does

08:54 Ising gave up. Wrong dimension.

13:32 Nigel almost met Ising. 40 minutes away.

26:38 AI is the best example of more is different

33:52 Bardeen won two Nobels. The transistor looked like chewing gum.

37:24 The three mysteries Crick couldn't solve

46:20 The genetic code can't evolve. And yet it did.

49:00 How early life evolved like a library

57:06 The purpose of life as a physics problem

01:00:04 Life is physics, not chemistry

01:05:56 Anti-science age. Not because of opinions.

01:13:00 20 seconds with your 20-year-old self

01:17:14 Different is more

Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt

Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu

Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1

Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating

Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join

Featured Guest:

Nigel Goldenfeld website: https://guava.physics.ucsd.edu/~nigel/

Lectures on Phase Transitions and the Renormalization Group: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0201554097?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallbackNigel Goldenfeld on Twitter/X: https://x.com/NigelGoldenfeld

My books:

Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA

Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu

Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U

Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un

Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating

Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com

Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog

Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast

#intotheimpossible #briankeating #NigelGoldenfeld #physics #AI #originoflife #condensedmatterphysics #podcast

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The system that produces the world’s most important discoveries runs on metrics that nobody agrees on, odds that would stop most people, and mentorship that sometimes looks like cruelty in blue ink. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation.

Lipomi is Professor and Chair of Chemical and Sustainability Engineering at the University of Rochester and the author of Science Nonfiction: Behind the Scenes in University Research. His lab works on organic electronics, materials science, recyclable polymers, and the science of human touch. He trained under George Whitesides at Harvard, one of the most cited chemists who has never won the Nobel Prize.

The conversation covers the H-index, what elite mentorship actually looks like when your advisor writes “This is illiterate” in blue ink on your outline, and what the future of academic research versus industry careers looks like in an era of AI, demographic headwinds, and graduate school debt that can’t be discharged in bankruptcy. We also get into homochirality, OLED displays, and why Lipomi thinks the nanotechnology revolution already happened, we just didn’t call it that.

What you’ll hear:

-Whether the academic system is designed to produce scientists or to filter them out

-What is Baumol’s cost disease and why it explains rising tuition costs

-Why the nanotechnology revolution already happened and nobody called it that

-How nanotechnology is used in cancer drug delivery today versus what science fiction promised

-What it actually takes to build a PhD career at the intersection of chemistry, mechanics, and neuroscience

-Whether engineering students should be reading Plato — and what countries that skip it are getting right

“Find a skill at the intersection of three or more interests that no one else is working on.” — Darren Lipomi

CHAPTERS

00:00 He says don't go to college. He runs the department.

01:10 The H-index: imperfect, irreplaceable

02:04 1 in 20 PhDs gets the job

05:42 The meteorite and the origin of life

08:34 Did life's asymmetry come from space?

12:00 Who is an organic materials chemist at 3am?

13:52 The collaboration that started at a coffee shop

15:22 The nanobot revolution already happened

18:24 Nanotechnology inside your body right now

19:08 The $70 billion invention Kodak gave away

22:12 Kodak, Xerox, Bausch + Lomb: what Rochester built

26:06 Working under Whitesides at Harvard

28:54 What he wrote on the outline in blue ink

30:38 Who you work with matters more than what you work on

31:56 Department chair: hostage negotiator, not boss

34:36 Why the department changed its name after 110 years

36:00 The headwinds have never been stronger

38:44 Should engineers read Plato?

39:38 The debt you can't discharge in bankruptcy

40:06 Do you buy Baumol's cost disease?

43:14 Why he had to write the book

48:16 The Fisher-Price camcorder experiment

51:06 Teaching in one sentence. Research in one.

53:42 Losing Darren to Rochester: the Fernando Tatis analogy

Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt

Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu

Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1

Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating

Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join

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John Martinis won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for proving macroscopic quantum tunneling is real. Less than a year later he’s telling why he left Google’s quantum computing team to start over. Subscribe if you want the physics and the politics of building the impossible.

Martinis is the co-founder of Colab and one of the physicists who proved ordinary quantum rules apply to macroscopic systems. He built his career on the same Josephson-junction hardware his Nobel is built on, then led Google’s superconducting-qubit effort, the same team behind Google’s 2019 quantum supremacy claim, before an internal reorg pushed him out.

We go into Anthony Leggett’s challenge to Schrödinger’s cat, what decoherence in quantum mechanics really means, and whether quantum computing is the first technology ever born from pure theory rather than experiment. We also cover the internal Google reorg that pushed Martinis out and what he learned about building something new inside a large institution.

• Whether quantum mechanics applies to the macroscopic world and what it took to prove it

• Why Martinis thinks quantum computing may be the first technology born from pure theory, not experiment

• What negative authority means and why it matters for anyone building something new inside a large institution

• Whether the US can win the quantum computing race against China

• How Martinis thinks about quantum mechanics interpretations after spending a career inside the math

“Always be on the lookout for the impossible, right?” John Martinis

CHAPTERS

00:00  The Nobel call that almost wasn't

01:01  How his wife found out before he did

03:32  Anthony Leggett's challenge to Schrödinger's cat

05:53  Why a Josephson junction, not a quantum dot or trapped ion

07:45  Quantized oscillations: the “smoking gun” and Balmer's ghost

08:18  Measuring the system: the resonance experiment

11:21  Systematic effects: what separates a good scientist from a lucky one

13:42  The Ed Ohm story: the man who found the CMB and doubted it

15:01  Wigner's “unreasonably effective” math and the weirdest thing about QM

16:54  The transistor myth: chewing gum, coat hangers, and germanium

17:34  Microwave engineering meets quantum mechanics

19:26  Decoherence: the friction you can't live without

24:06  The heretical claim: does theory ever precede technology?

28:22  The “paper qubit” problem

29:34  What quantum computers are actually good for

32:27  Should quantum computing be regulated like AI?

33:35  US vs. China: the quantum computing race

35:44  Collapse, Copenhagen, or many worlds? Martinis's answer

37:43  Leaving Google: “essentially demoted”

40:48  Why Colab exists and what “negative authority” means

42:50  The real bottleneck: funding, not physics

43:31  Final advice: always be on the lookout for the impossible

Qolab: https://qolab.ai/

Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt

Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu

Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1

Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating

Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join

My books:

Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA

Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu

Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U

Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un

Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating

Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com

Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog

Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast

Landing page: https://awake-mill-k25t.here.now

#intotheimpossible #briankeating #JohnMartinis #NobelPrize #quantumcomputing #physics #podcast

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Scott Dodelson spent ten years on the Dark Energy Survey testing the standard model of cosmology. It passed and missed by 2.5 sigma. The Director of Fermilab’s Cosmic Physics Division on why the theory he helped build may be wrong, why nobody can find dark matter, and what it takes to change a scientific consensus. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation.

Dodelson is Director of the Cosmic Physics Division at Fermilab, Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, and author of Modern Cosmology, the textbook a generation of cosmologists learned the field from.

Lambda-CDM predicts how the early universe’s tiny fluctuations grew into the structure we see today. The Dark Energy Survey was designed to check that prediction. The answer came back two and a half sigma off. That is both the most precise measurement ever made of how the universe grew, and a crack he cannot stop looking at. His question is not whether the model is close. It is whether close is enough to trust.

We get into the Sigma-8 tension and what it actually takes for a scientific community to change its mind, the Dodelson-Widrow mechanism and his 1994 proposal that sterile neutrinos produced in the early universe could constitute dark matter, and the Neptune vs. Vulcan history of getting dark matter right and wrong. Asked which of those two situations we are in now, Dodelson’s answer is: I have no idea.

What you’ll hear:

Why the April 24, 1992 CMB discovery may have been the only science story ever to lead the New York Times front column

The Dodelson-Widrow mechanism: how ordinary neutrinos in the early universe may have oscillated into the dark matter we see today

Why Brian told Neil deGrasse Tyson to his face that we have already detected dark matter

What it means when a theory can accommodate any result and whether inflation has that problem

Why the particle physics community still does not trust cosmology’s neutrino mass measurements

What cosmology looks like in 2036 if Lambda-CDM breaks

Killing the model is my dream.

0:00 None of it has been found in a lab. How many free passes do we get?

0:44 Dodelson helped build Lambda-CDM. His dream is to kill it.

2:10 10 years. One prediction. Two and a half sigma off.

5:42 "You're in charge" — what mentorship in science actually looks like

6:56 April 24, 1992: cosmology stopped being speculation

9:48 Geoff Burbidge went to his grave a steady-state believer

11:04 What a neutrino is and why it barely interacts with anything

12:36 Brian told Neil deGrasse Tyson we already detected dark matter

18:08 How ordinary neutrinos may have become dark matter

23:24 Lambda-CDM predicts Manhattan's density 13.7 billion years later

26:42 Two and a half sigma: technically a 1% chance the theory is right

28:04 Neptune was dark matter. Vulcan wasn't. Which one are we in now?

31:20 Dark matter, inflation, dark energy: none found in a lab

36:46 If both cracks are the same crack, Lambda-CDM is finished

Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt

Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu

Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1

Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating

Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join

Featured Guest:

Scott Dodelson Substack: https://scottdodelson.substack.com/about

Scott Dodelson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-dodelson-b6ba429/

Scott Dodelson on Twitter/X: https://x.com/ScottDodelson

Modern Cosmology (book): https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/monograph/9780128159484/modern-cosmology

Dark Energy Survey final results: https://www.darkenergysurvey.org/news-and-results/darchives/

Dodelson and Widrow 1994, Sterile neutrinos as dark matter: https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9303287

Previous ITI episode with Kyle Dawson on DESI: https://youtu.be/LPx4oiwGp2k?si=u_ZJWfJG5AhvBAEv 

My books:

Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA

Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu

Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U

Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un

Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating

Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com

Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog

Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast

#intotheimpossible #briankeating #cosmology #darkmatter #darkenergy #physics #LambdaCDM #podcast

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