Into the Impossible With Brian Keating The Universe Didn’t Come From Nothing | The Peter McCormack Show
15 snips
Aug 28, 2026 
Brian Keating, experimental cosmologist at UC San Diego who leads CMB experiments probing the early universe. He wrestles with whether time is fundamental, asks what came before the Big Bang, and explains how the Simons Observatory could spot primordial gravitational waves. Conversation jumps to dark matter, UFO disclosure, AI limits, mortality, and why something cannot truly come from nothing.
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What Came Before The Big Bang Question
- Keating presses the paradox of a universe beginning when there were no prior moments to start it, asking what a 'moment zero' pushes against.
- He frames the central question as what preceded the Big Bang and how time could emerge.
Why Interstellar Looks Cool But Fails Experimentally
- Keating admires Interstellar's effort but calls major elements implausible, e.g., spinning a seat to open a wormhole and pre-establishing an exit point.
- He contrasts cinematic physics with experimentalist standards and labels some movie mechanics "nonsense."
Searching For A Cosmological Time Field
- Keating proposes a cosmological arrow of time: a time field that sets a direction and rate for time and could be observable.
- He says Simons Observatory aims to measure signals that would provide a mechanism for time's one-way flow.
