Brian Keating is Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California, San Diego, and Principal Investigator and co-founder of the Simons Observatory.
This site is the working one: three research programs, each with a paper, a dated public record, and an open invitation. Books, public lectures, the podcast, and the newsletter live at briankeating.com.
Three research programs
POLITE
Does the vacuum disperse or rotate light? First purely optical constraint on vacuum dispersion — |Δc/c| < 3.75 × 10-10 — from eclipse timing of five Algol-type binaries, plus a polarimeter in development for the birefringence channel.
First result March 2026 · 98% statistics-limited
The Artificial Einstein Test
Restrict a model to the knowledge available before a major breakthrough, then ask whether it can reconstruct that breakthrough. A benchmark programme with a documented public record running back to 2021, and a first open deployment that is instructive precisely because it does not pass.
First formulation July 2021 · research note August 2026
The Keating Equation
A Drake-like factorization for life moving between worlds, and what Mars’s silence actually constrains. Delivery is the tractable part; establishment is where the answer lives.
Framework June 2026
Research
I am an experimental cosmologist. I build instruments that measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background in order to test what happened in the first moments of the universe — principally by searching for the B-mode signature of primordial gravitational waves from inflation. I conceived and led the first BICEP telescope at the South Pole, lead the POLARBEAR-2 and Simons Array experiments in Chile, and co-founded the Simons Observatory in 2016.
More on the research programme · Publications · Curriculum vitae (PDF)
Elsewhere
briankeating.com — books, public lectures, podcast, newsletter · UC San Diego profile · Google Scholar
Brian Keating 