Welcome to a special Father's Day edition of the Into the Impossible Podcast with yours truly Professor Brian Keating and it is no stretch of the imagination to say I wouldn't be a professor without today's guest

Peter is my PhD advisor and in as much as you can say in academia he is

basically like my academic father and we talk about our influences his PhD

advisor the late great David Wilkinson after whom the NASA satellite called

the W-map satellite was named. He had a tremendous career also connected to

the initial discovery of the cosmic microwave background, famous being told by one of his colleagues, Bob Dickey at Princeton, as you'll hear, boys, we've been scooped by Pensius and Wilson.

But Peter fulfills that role, as we say in the Russian language the word for scientists

translates to someone who was taught and to me that implicates the scientist as

having a duty and obligation morally or otherwise to teach and to teach people

but not only in the laboratory teach them the Schrodinger equation perturbation equations

in in quantum mechanics or in general relativity or in my case how to build a microwave

radiometer and look for the polarization of the microwave background, but also in life lessons.

Some of my greatest mentors in life were scientists, scientists such as

Peter, such as Andrew Lang, the late great Andrew Lang that I write about in losing

the Nobel Prize. And these men and women that advise students have a solemn duty,

but also we become part of each other's lives.

So Peter is in my life nearly 30 years after I met him as a bubbling, fumbling graduate student at Brown University.

Now he's at Wisconsin. He still makes time. fumbling graduate student at Brown University.

Now he's at Wisconsin.

He still makes time every time I need something from him

or I want to talk to him.

And this is really just a highlight.

...