Transcription
Newton had the impostor syndrome. He said, "You're kidding me, Newton?" He was like, cuz Newton was kind of a prick. Newton had a huge ego. He was not kind to his friends. He tortured people as the Master of the Mint, or he had them tortured. Tortured people? Yeah, he physically tortured people. He was responsible. He was like the exe—he was responsible for the equivalent of the IRS in in England. So people would cheat. They would scrape down pennies. That's right. Read this. He was the Master of the Mint. It was called, yeah, that's right. I forgot about this. Alist. He, he was an amazing guy, but he was kind of a prick and he had impostor syndrome as well. So he had impostor syn—
Now, who could he have impostor syndrome about, you might wonder? And if you read his writings, do you know what Isaac Newton, the creator of calculus, the uh, first person to understand universal gravitation, discovered laws of optics, do you know what his biggest accomplishment, according to him, was? What he died a virgin. Yeah, that was a weird one, right? Yeah, I was going to bring that up. He was celibate. You know why? Why? Because there's only one way that he could emulate his hero, his the person before whom he felt the impostor syndrome. And who was that? That was Jesus Christ. Oh boy. So he wanted to be Christlike. He wanted to emulate Christ. And the only way he could do it, he couldn't like fast or, I don't know, he couldn't bapti—walk on water. He couldn't turn water into one. He couldn't turn loaves into fishes or whatever Jesus also did. But he could die celibate. And that's who he had impostors. Are you sure he just didn't, was like an excuse for he didn't like sex? I don't know. I mean, it sounds nutty because like, how do you figure that out when you're like 14, 15 years old? You know, you're young and full of hormones and you've made this decision to be like Jesus. Yeah, he sounds insane. He definitely was. He was not like you would want to hang out with. G—if you meta want to hang out with him too? Yeah, for a little bit, just to see what it's like.
So when you win the Nobel Prize, you go there and what is, what is the commandment about idol worship? It's that you shall make no guild golden graven, like engraved images. So who is that? Do you know who that is? Uh, Albert Noble. Yeah, it's Alfred Nobel. That's right. Alfred. And you know, he invented dynamite. Uh, and he, he also died. He died never having been married. I don't know if he was celibate or so he was never married. Um, but he, he established his. When you win it, you literally the King of Sweden comes up to you and you must bow down to him and he puts the gilded graven image on your head. So for all the, you know, trappings, all the 90% of National Academy members who do not believe, actively profess a belief in God, this can become at some level of religion. And it's a kosher one. It's okay to worship, right? Well, the unattainable for that, that's maybe perhaps attainable to a very select few, is always the thing that people are chasing after, especially like high achievers. That's right. But many, many that I know that get there do have impostor syndrome, including MMA world champions. Like some of them, they get there like, this isn't real. This can't be real. I can't be the man. Cuz they've set this up their whole life. And also, it's, they look, you can get to the promised land, but you can't stay in it. How many baseball teams have won the uh, World Series year after year forever? I mean, even the Yankees haven't done that. Even your BX haven't done that, right? They're not mine. Okay, fine. Um, but for me, as a young kid, this is, this is what I aspired. And actually, as an adult, I wanted to win this basically at all costs. This became my. But it was acceptable because people told me, you know, like, if you discover these waves of gravity manifest in the cosmic background radiation that I study, you're guaranteed to win the Nobel Prize. And it became an obsession to me, as well as being scientifically interesting to be a part of. There are very few projects that are eligible to win a Nobel Prize, let alone that like can win it. But, but for me, it was kind of an added dimension that came with it. And that was, you know, like the normal kid might have it with sports. And her dad, or or or maybe the other way around with your when you're a dad, you might treat your kids like that. Like, oh, you think you could take me on or whatever. Like, um, and so for that, that was the main source of driving impetus for my personal quest to get this particular idol in my life. That's wild.
Are you aware of uh, Ronald Mallet? Do you know who he is? No. He is, uh, I believe he's out of the University of Connecticut. He studies time travel. And he became obsessed with time travel after his father died when he was a young boy. Cuz he felt like if he worked hard enough, he could develop a time machine and go back and save his father. It's w—it's literally a Spider-Man origin story. Exactly. This guy has been dedicated his life to finding, uh, a working model of a time machine. And I think, uh, was it, uh, Kurt Godel? Like, how do you say, is Gerle? It's that weird. How do you say it? What? Gerle? Ger? It's like people that say Van Gogh and then now it's really Van. Excuse you. Um, but he developed a working model, but it, it just required something like the size of the of the solar system. No, you're right. I don't know how you know that, but yeah, he had a spiraling, he had a rotating cosmos where you could have what are called world lines. You could have your, just like you could walk around the surface of the Earth and if you go in the same direction, eventually you'll come back to where you started. In the, if the universe was somehow rotating in the way that he envisioned it, you could have it end up on a, on a time start where you began from the beginning. Yeah. See that traveler life like Tim, like Curve Girdle's interesting because he, he and Einstein were buddies, um, back at the Institute for Advanced Study. Like, I don't know if you saw Oppenheimer. Bud? I haven't seen it yet. Oh, you should say it. I don't go to the movies. I do go to the movies. I saw Barbie. Yeah. Did your girls? But everything's a goddamn culture war. I know. That's what I love about astronomy. No one ever freaking wakes up and says, see that comet over there? I [ __ ] that's a Republican. There's there's there's a Democrat. Astro. No, SC. It also makes, you're studying things that are so immense and so spectacular that it makes all this stuff seem like nonsense. This stuff that people fill their days up with complaining about. But [ __ ] Barbie movie. Jesus Christ.