Dr Brian Keating

If the Multiverse Is Real, How Do You Know You're You?

2.8K views · 9h ago · 38:15

I gave this talk at a 2017 consciousness conference with one claim: human beings are the most highly evolved form of the most common thing in the universe. Then I showed how that same thing fooled Galileo, fooled William Herschel, and fooled my own experiment.

Topics: The most evolved form of the most common thing · Often in error, never in doubt · Brain or universe? You cannot tell · What Galileo actually proved · Galileo's biggest blunder · Are we the center of the multiverse?

Jim Al-Khalili: Physicists Are Being Sloppy About Time

43K views · 3d ago · 40:27

Guest: Jim Al-Khalili

The block universe says all times coexist and the present moment is not special. Loschmidt’s paradox says the fundamental equations of physics are reversible, and yet ice never unmelts, cream never separates from coffee. Nobody has solved that contradiction. The entanglement past hypothesis, his own new proposal developed with a colleague at UC San Diego, proposes that the answer is not in thermodynamics but in quantum entanglement growing from almost nothing at the Big Bang.

Topics: Physicists are being sloppy about time · Which is more real: yesterday or tomorrow? · Irreversibility from reversible equations · The past hypothesis: almost cheating · No gravity. No time. · The entanglement past hypothesis

Max Tegmark: AI Is Not A Tool, It’s A New Species

105K views · 1w ago · 52:53

Guest: Max Tegmark

MIT physicist Max Tegmark says AI companies aren’t building a tool. They’re building a new species. After 700 rogue agents broke out of OpenAI and nobody will say what happened, he explains why rushing this is the one blunder humanity can’t undo.

Topics: Will AI wipe us out? · Did AI just crack a million-dollar math problem? · Did OpenAI’s AI steal a professor’s work? · OpenAI’s Orwellian non-answer · Can an LLM have Einstein’s happiest thought? · Can you believe in simulations AND high P(doom)?

Ethan Mollick: What AI Can Actually Do vs. What We Fear

15K views · 1w ago · 56:29

Guest: Ethan Mollick

Forecasters gave AI under 2% odds of helping solve a millennium-level math problem by September 2026. It happened. Ethan Mollick has been measuring what AI actually does to real work with field experiments, not forecasts, and his answer is not what most people expect.

Topics: AI writes good papers now. Taste is the weak spot. · The jagged frontier: math olympiad gold, but not the Rs in strawberry · Deep knowledge, wide knowledge, taste, and agency · Escalator or eschaton? · Does AI simulate wisdom or actually have it? · The labs keep AI in English. Here is why.

UFO Physics Explained: What Happened Near Nimitz? Kevin Knuth

16K views · 2w ago · 9:06

What would thousands of g do to a craft and its occupants? Physicist Kevin Knuth walks through the reported Nimitz Tic-Tac and Japan Airlines encounters—and the extraordinary acceleration, energy, and power estimates they imply under his assumptions.

Topics: The reported Nimitz maneuver · How distance and time imply thousands of g · What would happen to the occupants? · Why the unknown mass matters · Where 1,100 gigawatts comes from · The waste-heat problem

Disclosure Debate: Are UFOs Alien Tech? Avi Loeb vs Michael Shermer

34K views · 2w ago · 1:16:28

Guest: Disclosure Debate

Is there alien technology in our skies, or just birds, balloons and bad video? Two members of the White House UAP Science Advisory Council face off LIVE. Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who chairs the council, makes the case for searching. Michael Shermer, the council skeptic Loeb picked himself, says show me the evidence. They have $1,000 riding on whether non-human technology is confirmed by 2030.

Adam Grant: How to Build Chemistry in a Remote World

26K views · 2w ago · 39:46

Guest: Adam Grant

Grant’s new book Vibe is his seventh. It argues that the science of human connection has been hiding in plain sight for a century, and that most of what people do to build relationships is either backward or unnecessary.

Topics: Vibing is real. Your brainwaves prove it. · Task conflict vs. relationship conflict · Who is actually in charge: parents or infants? · Burstiness: the remote work pattern that works · Don’t trust your gut. Test it. · Confident humility: the essence of a good scientist

Terence Tao: “You Cannot Trust AI”

36K views · 2w ago · 9:52

Guest: Terence Tao

Fields Medalist Terence Tao explains why AI can’t be trusted on its own, and why that doesn’t make it useless. He shares how mathematicians are already using large language models to surface forgotten approaches, why AI’s real power lies in tackling millions of medium-difficulty problems rather than the famous ones, and how education must shift toward teaching students to verify and critique what they see.

Roman Yampolskiy vs Joscha Bach: Can Anyone Control Superintelligence?

59K views · 3w ago · 1:08:39

Roman Yampolskiy says keeping a superintelligence safe forever is as impossible as building a perpetual motion machine. Joscha Bach says today's AI is more controllable than anyone expected, and that shutting it down would doom us anyway.

Topics: Simulation theory meets certain doom · Is P(doom) even a real number? · Why a simulated world still matters · Should we have skipped the Trinity test? · Did nukes actually keep the peace? · Why haven't we wiped out the spiders?

Nobel Winner Francis Halzen: Physics Is a Miserable Career

139K views · 3w ago · 4:05

Guest: Nobel Winner Francis Halzen

The man who won the Nobel Prize for IceCube tells young scientists the truth: by every objective measure, physics is a miserable career. The only reason to do it is obsession. Francis Halzen on the insecurity he carried for decades, why imagination can beat intelligence, and the Nobel logbook that made Barry Barish feel like an impostor next to Einstein.

Nobel Prize Winning Physicist Francis Halzen: How Neutrinos Found A Monster!

4.5K views · 3w ago · 7:40

In almost every branch of astronomy, the Milky Way gets in the way first. IceCube saw something stranger. In this conversation, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Francis Halzen walks through the neutrino sky: the 2017 identification of TXS 0506+056, the 88 neutrinos pointing toward the active galaxy NGC 1068, and the 4.2 sigma result that emerged from a blind analysis.

Terence Tao: How to Think Like A Fields Medalist

14K views · 3w ago · 3:49

Guest: Terence Tao

A Fields Medalist and the world’s greatest living mathematician hit a wall so brutal his advisor refused to help him. Here is the counterintuitive breakthrough that proved reputation and raw genius are worthless without rigorous proof. Terence Tao is a UCLA professor, Fields Medalist, and MacArthur Fellow widely regarded as the Mozart of mathematics.

Topics: The Day Raw Genius Failed · Why Your Advisor Won't Save You · The Proof That Crushed Assumptions · How True Breakthroughs Actually Happen

Nobel Prize Winner Francis Halzen: I Thought IceCube Would FAIL!

9.5K views · 3w ago · 4:35

People told Francis Halzen that a neutrino telescope frozen into the South Pole ice was a cute idea that would never work. He agreed with them. He went deep into debt to the NSF and the University of Wisconsin before IceCube saw a single neutrino, and he explains why the best moment was not the cosmic discovery but the first boring atmospheric one.

Nobel Economist Daron Acemoglu WARNING: AI's Payoff Is NOT What You Think

18K views · 3w ago · 31:50

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.

Topics: Can science survive without democracy? · Why a Nobel laureate left Berkeley for China · What Galileo knew that Kepler didn't · Is peer review undemocratic? · The optimal amount of scientific heresy · Science isn't slowing. So what broke?

The Man Who Fed The World — And Poisoned It

5.7K views · 3w ago · 15:24

Fritz Haber won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pulling ammonia out of thin air. That one reaction still feeds about half the people on Earth. He also ran Germany's poison gas program in World War I and earned the name "father of chemical warfare."

Topics: The controversial prize · Nobel committee blunders · The Haber-Bosch process · Nitrogen and life cycles · Feeding the global population · Chemistry of ammonia synthesis