Hi friends. I guess this week is Professor Brian Keating and he almost won the Nobel Prize.

And today we're going to find out just what it feels like to lose it.

It's a really cool story. He's set up the Bicep 2 telescope in Antarctica and it looked like him and his colleagues had made a unique discovery

and there was a rollercoaster of what actually happened and some disputes about the data and what it showed.

There's politics from the Nobel Prize Association and I didn't understand what it was or how it works, how it's chosen and what the processes and the heritage of this particular organization are.

But we're going to find all of that out today. It's a very interesting story, albeit at the expense of Professor Keating.

But if you enjoy this episode, go back and check out the ones with Sabina Hossenfelder and Professor Adam Frank.

They're both fantastic physicists and they have a lot to add to this discussion about the politics of science.

Obviously, if you love the episode, please share it. It makes me very happy. But for now, let's welcome Professor Keating.

Oh yeah, PS. I've started to shorten down the intros to these podcasts because I respect your time and I found myself skipping through a lot of the research.

I've been through a lot of the introductions to podcasts that I listened to as well. In future, I'm going to endeavour to keep them around about one minute.

I think this should be enough time to tell you about the guest and inform you of any upcoming announcements which are important.

But if you feel like you need to know more or less, if you want me to chop it down even further and just say hi friends, then let me know.

I'll see you guys next time.

I don't know how usual that is, but I heard my friend Mario Livio on your show about two months ago, a month and a half ago.

And the interview that you did was phenomenal. And of course, he's such an engaging and very deep fellow that I felt like it would be a good opportunity for me to share some of the ideas that I've been thinking about in my work as a cosmologist.

As I point out, I don't do hair and nails, but a lot of people think I do until they meet me.

Nor do I tell horoscopes, but instead what I look for is really the earliest evidence for the beginning of the universe.

And what I thought is so interesting about the perspective that colleagues such as myself can provide in contradiction to those of these are you died really folks you've had on like Mario is that I'm an experimentalist.

So an experimentalist as a cosmologist, it doesn't mean that we build the universes.

I've got a healthy ego, but not quite that healthy. Let's just think that I could actually build a universe, but instead we build telescopes that will allow us hopefully to reveal the earliest evidence for what's known as the Big Bang and how we came to know what the universe is comprised of along the way may hopefully be revealed through the types of telescopes that myself and my colleagues build.

And this is very different from those of the professions, you know, as practiced by your, your, you know, late countrymen and my distant late colleague, Stephen Hawking or Sir Roger Penrose who recently visited me in San Diego and was part of our podcast that we run for the R3 Clark Center here in San Diego.

...