Loading...

PODCAST

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Big Bang Productions Inc.

Think like a physicist. Wonder like a human. Into the Impossibleis 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 askedWhat’s out there?orWhat’s next?, this is where curiosity meets clarity. Learn to think like

science natural sciences

All Episodes

35:19

Nobel Economist Daron Acemoglu WARNING: AI's Payoff...

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating ·

2026/10/05

Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu says AI's real productivity gain is an order of magnitude smaller than the industry claims.The bigger danger is not the machine. It is that a handful of people are deciding how it gets built. Daron Acemoglu is an MIT economist who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. We cover: why a Nobel chemist left Berkeley for China, the optimal amount of heresy science should tolerate, the one rule that would end algorithmic outrage without censoring anyone, the

en

13:28

AI Is the New Tower of Babel (And Its Builders Know It)

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating ·

2026/10/03

The new Tower of Babel, and its builders are becoming like gods to us. The bigger threat isn't killer robots; it's how much of your own mind you've already handed over.I joined Mike Slater on Politics By Faith (The First) to talk about AI, faith, and the people building it. We cover: why Babel is always the city AND the tower, how the same AI that discovers drugs can build super viruses, what I'm seeing in my own classroom as term begins, why cognitive offloading scares me more than

en

60:15

Robert Wright: AI Alignment Is a Moral Problem, Not a...

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating ·

2026/09/30

The real AI alignment problem is not technical. It is moral. You cannot align a superintelligence to human values if humans cannot agree on what those values are, and you cannot get that agreement without a level of global cooperation we have never managed before. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation. The Tower of Babel is the AI parable nobody is reading. Technology that outpaces wisdom fragments the people building it. The Fermi paradox offers the grimmer version:

en

63:02

Former NASA Physicist: The UAP Maneuver That Should...

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating ·

2026/09/27

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

en

66:19

Carlo Rovelli: Free Will Is Real. Physics Can Prove It.

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating ·

2026/09/22

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

en

125:24

They Built the Quietest Place on Earth to Find Dark...

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating ·

2026/09/17

They Built the Quietest Place on Earth to Find Dark MatterOne 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

en

15:35

Dark Matter Has a Problem. So Does MOND.

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating ·

2026/09/15

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

en

78:31

OpenAI’s Navier–Stokes Claim: Is This What AGI Looks...

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating ·

2026/09/09

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

en

58:20

Roman Yampolskiy vs Emad Mostaque: I Was The Only...

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating ·

2026/09/01

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

en

106:02

The Universe Didn’t Come From Nothing | The Peter...

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating ·

2026/08/28

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

en

77:53

The Physics Reason AI Works When It Shouldn’t

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating ·

2026/08/25

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

en

60:26

Engineering Chair: Most People Should Not Go To College

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating ·

2026/08/18

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,

en

49:23

John Martinis: The Nobel Physicist Behind Macroscopic...

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating ·

2026/08/11

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

en

40:44

Fermilab’s Scott Dodelson on Cosmology’s Crisis

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating ·

2026/08/04

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

en

71:32

Faith & the Physicist: Aliens, Astrobiology, String...

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating ·

2026/07/31

Two theoretical physicists helped design landmark surveys of 1,600+ scientists on the deepest unsolved questions in physics — and found almost no consensus at all.From string theory's shockingly low support to physicists admitting their models run on "belief," this episode exposes the faith hiding inside science. Adam Frank (University of Rochester astrophysicist and astrobiologist) and Niayesh Afshordi (Perimeter Institute / University of Waterloo cosmologist, co-author of the APS Physics

en

109:08

Annie Jacobsen: How One Lab Leak Ends the World in 6...

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating ·

2026/07/28

Annie Jacobsen on BIOLOGICAL WAR: how a single lab leak could take us from outbreak to anarchy in six days — and why bio may be scarier than nuclear. WIN a signed copy of BIOLOGICAL WAR or NUCLEAR WAR, a meteorite & more — enter free: https://briankeating.com/annie (Join there for the free Biological War Scenario Simulation and Source Dossier + early access to my next Nobel-laureate interview.) Covid killed ~1% of the people it infected. Pneumonic plague, untreated, kills nearly 100% within 24

en

79:36

We Built Something We Can’t Control | A Warning from...

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating ·

2026/07/21

If anyone builds superintelligent AI before we know how to control it, everyone dies. Nate Soares wrote the book on why that’s not a metaphor. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation.Soares runs the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and co-wrote If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies with Eliezer Yudkowsky. The first word in that title is if. That matters. His argument is not that doom is certain. His argument is that the path we are on leads there, that the driver is asleep

en

67:38

Michael Shermer: The Only Skeptic on the Alien Task...

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating ·

2026/07/15

Michael Shermer just joined the White House’s new UAP task force alongside Avi Loeb. He also has a $1,000 bet with Loeb that we won’t find aliens by 2030. Both things are true. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation. Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, author of Truth, and one of the most consistent voices for evidence-based thinking in public life. He was recruited onto the task force as the devil’s advocate. His job: be the skeptic in the room. He’s not a

en

123:54

400K Subscribers Asked Me Anything. The Answers Got...

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating ·

2026/07/11

400,000 of you showed up for physics with no compromises, so I did something different for the milestone. No highlight reel. I took your hardest questions live and answered them, then got honest about the part of this job nobody asks about: the discipline behind running a serious science podcast. We get into why clocks didn't tick differently in the early universe, what it actually means that the Big Bang happened everywhere at once, and whether JWST has any real shot at catching a Population III

en

65:43

Top Astronomer: UFOs Are STILL Here

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating ·

2026/07/07

Astrophysicist Beatriz Villarroel found point-like flashes in sky photographs taken before a single satellite existed. Nine of them lit up simultaneously on one 1950s plate. Nothing in orbit could have made them — because nothing was in orbit yet. Beatriz Villarroel leads VASCO, which scanned 600 million objects across 70 years of photographic sky surveys hunting for things that appear, then vanish. We cover: why finding zero vanishing stars pointed at something stranger than what she was looking

en

637 results

Similar Podcasts

The Deep Dive Lab: Unraveling Materials Science

Son Hoang

New Books in Political Science

New Books Network

Station 151

Pale Matter | Realm

Beyond the Divide

Koala Moon

StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson

Neil deGrasse Tyson