This month's episode of Books and Ideas is an interview with astronomer Brian Keating about his memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science's Highest Honor. His book is a first hand look at the hard work behind the scientific effort to determine how the universe really began, but as the title implies, it also contains a candid account of how striving for the Nobel Prize can be both motivating, but strangely counterproductive.