Brian Keating: "Losing the Nobel Prize" | Talks at Google

Professor Brian Keating () is an astrophysicist with UC San Diego’s Department of Physics. He and his team develop instrumentation to study the early universe at radio, microwave and infrared wavelengths. He is the author of over 100 scientific publications and holds two U.S.Patents. He received an NSF CAREER award in 2006 and a 2007 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers at the White House from President Bush for a telescope he invented and deployed at the U.S. South Pole Research Station called “BICEP". Professor Keating became a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2016. He co-leads the Simons Observatory () Cosmic Microwave Background experiments in the Atacama Desert of Chile.
His latest book, Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science's Highest Honor (link below), has been selected as one of Amazon.com’s Ten Best Nonfiction Books of the Month for and one of Nature Magazine’s Six Best Books of the Season.
Brian discusses the difficult problem of exploring the beginnings of the universe, moments after the Big Bang. His quest for the Nobel Prize in Physics was stymied when his experiment which was thought to have discovered definitive proof of the Big Bang ended up just being space dust. To add insult to injury, he was then asked to be part of the nominating committee for the following year’s Nobel Prize award. His journey of self-discovery and introspection opened his eyes to the ways in which the Nobel Prize process itself is broken, and has diverged from what was originally intended by its founder, Alfred Nobel.
Get the book here: