Brian Keating

American cosmologist at UC San Diego — designer of the BICEP telescope at the South Pole — author of Losing the Nobel Prize — who came close to winning the Nobel Prize when his team's claimed detection of primordial gravitational waves was contaminated by cosmic dust.

Provides the most candid first-person account of a major scientific near-miss — Losing the Nobel Prize documents the 2014 BICEP2 announcement (which appeared to confirm cosmic inflation), the subsequent retraction, and what it reveals about scientific incentive structures.