UC San Diego professor Brian Keating wanted to understand how our solar system, our galaxy, our universe came to be.

The big bang theory didn’t fully explain the properties of our universe. So he built a telescope at the South Pole to detect signals from the earliest time possible, billions of light years away. This journey led him down a path of ambition, rivalry, discovery and failure. Ultimately, Keating has to grapple with his ego and what it means to be successful as a scientist This is part two of Keating's story. If you haven't listened to part one, go back and listen to that one first.

Brian Keating's book about his journey searching for Inflation: https://www.amazon.com/Losing-Nobel-Prize-Cosmology-Ambition/dp/1324000910

A link to the music video that accompanies "The Surface of Light" song that played during the end credits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2INJiNpZFBI

Correction: Margot mentions that her friend was first author on the the paper that suggested BICEP2's results could be explained by dust. He was, in fact, the second author. The first author was Raphael Flauger who is coincidentally a Physics professor at UC San Diego.