Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb. It is Saturday, so we have
Speaker 1: a vault episode for you. This one is going to
Speaker 1: be an interview that Joe conducted with a friend of
Speaker 1: the show, Daniel Whitson, titled Do Alien Speak Physics? And
Speaker 1: of course this concern is Whitson's new book, Do Alien
Speaker 1: Speak Physics out now wherever you get your books. So
Speaker 1: without further ado, let's jump right into this interview episode.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3: Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
Speaker 3: name is Joe McCormick. Today on the podcast, we're going
Speaker 3: to be featuring an interview in which I talked to
Speaker 3: returning show guest physicist Daniel Whitson about his upcoming book book,
Speaker 3: Do Aliens Speak Physics. Daniel shared an advance copy of
Speaker 3: this book with me, and I think it's great. It
Speaker 3: is a fascinating book length thought experiment that is full
Speaker 3: of insights about what could be universal and what could
Speaker 3: be unique in surprising ways about human intelligence, science, language, mathematics,
Speaker 3: and culture. A bit of bio about Daniel. Daniel Whitson
Speaker 3: is a particle physicist and physics professor. He's the co
Speaker 3: host of the podcast Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe and
Speaker 3: co author of We Have No Idea, also co creator
Speaker 3: of the PBS kids show Eleanor Wonders Why. His book
Speaker 3: Do Aliens Speak Physics? Is co written and illustrated by
Speaker 3: Andy Warner. And now onto my conversation with Daniel Daniel Whitson,
Speaker 3: Welcome back to the show.
Speaker 4: Thanks so much for having me on. Excited to talk
Speaker 4: to you again.
Speaker 3: So the book is Do Aliens Speak Physics? And I
Speaker 3: have really really been enjoying this book. I plan to
Speaker 3: finish it with a full read for today. But my
Speaker 3: last night, my toddler was having some sleep disturbances. That
Speaker 3: was an all night thing, so I was rushing to
Speaker 3: get through the last couple chapters. Maybe you can fill
Speaker 3: me in with the greater detail that I missed in
Speaker 3: the skimming of the last two or three.
Speaker 4: Maybe you should have read the book to you toddler
Speaker 4: to help put them to sleep.
Speaker 3: Maybe I think she would really like the illustrations. Actually,
Speaker 3: but the problem is I had digital versions, so that
Speaker 3: would involve showing it to her on a screen, which
Speaker 3: is a whole other thing. You know, that just turns
Speaker 3: into want to see other things on the screen. So
Speaker 3: can't wait for my print copy. That'll be exciting. But
Speaker 3: I guess we should start with the elevator pitch. What
Speaker 3: is the central question you're exploring in this book?
Speaker 4: Yeah, the question the book asks is whether aliens do
Speaker 4: science and specifically physics, the same way we do. You know,
Speaker 4: when aliens arrive, can they just tell us the secrets
Speaker 4: of the universe? Can they leap us forward a thousand,
Speaker 4: a million, a billion years into the scientific future? Is
Speaker 4: science really just one track that way, one line and
Speaker 4: we could just sort of like skip forward, you know,
Speaker 4: with the benefits of all their time and energy. Or
Speaker 4: is science more complicated? Is it multiple paths? Are there
Speaker 4: multiple solutions? Do aliens even do science? So this book
Speaker 4: is an exploration essentially of like how universal is our
Speaker 4: theory of physics? Is what we're learning something about the
Speaker 4: universe or is it something about the way we think?
Speaker 4: Or both? And can we try to figure that out
Speaker 4: before the aliens arrive.
Speaker 3: One of the metaphors or kind of shorthand that you
Speaker 3: use in the book is the idea of an interplanetary
Speaker 3: physics conference. You're asking the question, if we ever make,
Speaker 3: you know, undeniable contact with an alien species, can we
Speaker 3: get our heads together and communicate meaningfully about the laws
Speaker 3: of physics? And so to illustrate those kinds of meetings,
Speaker 3: one thing I really liked about your book is that
Speaker 3: each chapter comes with what you call a contact hypothetical,
Speaker 3: where you kind of tell a little story. There's some
Speaker 3: fiction writing in this book. It's mostly, you know, nonfiction,
Speaker 3: scientific writing and philosophical writing. But I like these little
Speaker 3: fictional scenarios, and I think we might want to get
Speaker 3: into a couple of these as we go along. But
Speaker 3: before we do that, to sort of frame how you
Speaker 3: explore the question of do aliens speak physics? And could
Speaker 3: we communicate about physics with them? You extend the classic
Speaker 3: Drake equation, So could you explain that, maybe first explain
Speaker 3: what the original Drake equation is and how it works,
Speaker 3: and then also explain the way you extend it and
Speaker 3: the terms you added to it to get at this
Speaker 3: alien physics conference question.
Speaker 4: Yes, so the Alien Physics Conference is in there because
Speaker 4: it's a literal fantasy of mine, you know, I mean,
Speaker 4: I got into physics to understand the universe, and I
Speaker 4: want to figure it out, but sometimes I feel like, gosh,
Speaker 4: progress is frustratingly slow, and you know what if there
Speaker 4: are aliens out there that just have the answers, it's
Speaker 4: so tantalizing and frustrating to think that, like somebody out
Speaker 4: there has figured out what is quantum gravity? How do
Speaker 4: you build wormholes? How did the universe begin? Like somebody
Speaker 4: maybe knows these answers and they could just tell us,
Speaker 4: beam them to us, email us your textbooks. You know,
Speaker 4: imagine you know, Newton getting to read Einstein's a relativity theory,
Speaker 4: or you know, Aristotle getting to read modern physics, like
Speaker 4: that could be us. Wow, so that's in there because
Speaker 4: that's my literal, like I can taste it, but you know,
Speaker 4: I also wonder if it's really true, and so I
Speaker 4: sort of The book is a meditation on like all right, Daniel,
Speaker 4: calm down. Maybe those answers aren't actually out there. And
Speaker 4: we wrote those little fictional interludes to try to give
Speaker 4: like more concrete examples rather than just thinking theoretically about
Speaker 4: the nature of physics and the structure of and the
Speaker 4: philosophical underpinnings, like let's walk through what it might be
Speaker 4: like to give people a concrete example. And also we
Speaker 4: didn't want to tackle the whole question at once, like
Speaker 4: it's a lot of pieces, and so we were inspired
Speaker 4: by the way Drake took apart the question of are
Speaker 4: there aliens out there? And why haven't we heard from them?
Speaker 4: He broke that into pieces, and he starts by calculating
Speaker 4: how many stars are in the universe, what fraction of
Speaker 4: those stars might have life, what fraction of stars with
Speaker 4: life might develop civilization, how long do those civilizations last.
Speaker 4: It's a classic approach in science. You have a problem
Speaker 4: that's too big to solve, so you break it into
Speaker 4: a bunch of pieces, none of which you maybe can solve,
Speaker 4: but some of which you can make a little bit
Speaker 4: of progress on. So you're not completely stymied by your
Speaker 4: inability to make progress one area, because you can move
Speaker 4: in another area. And for example, we now know that
Speaker 4: there are lots and lots of stars in the universe.
Speaker 4: Every galaxy that's out there has like hundreds of billions
Speaker 4: of stars, and there's hung's of billions of galaxies. So
Speaker 4: the number of stars out there just in the observable
Speaker 4: universe is very, very vast, and shockingly, We've made progress
Speaker 4: on other aspects, like how many planets does an average
Speaker 4: star have? And the answer again is surprisingly big. You know,
Speaker 4: there's a lot of uncertainty there and depends on how
Speaker 4: you define earth like planet, But like something like twenty
Speaker 4: five percent of stars out there have rocky planets that are,
Speaker 4: you know, earth like according to some definition. So we're
Speaker 4: talking a huge number of earth like planets in the universe.
Speaker 4: But you know, the Drake equation is multiplicative. The number
Speaker 4: of aliens that contact us is the number of stars
Speaker 4: times the fraction that have life, times the fraction that
Speaker 4: are technological, et cetera. So if any of those numbers
Speaker 4: are zero, we're screwed. And we don't know what fraction
Speaker 4: of those planets have life, and what fraction of that
Speaker 4: life becomes technological, and how long that life lasts. So
Speaker 4: that's the structure of the Drake equation, and we thought
Speaker 4: it was a natural thing to do to extend that
Speaker 4: to answer the qu question how many alien civilizations are
Speaker 4: there out there that we can talk science with? And
Speaker 4: so to do that we broke it into several questions.
Speaker 4: We said, well, what fraction of them do science? You know,
Speaker 4: is that even a thing aside of Earth, is science
Speaker 4: like a human endeavor? Maybe everybody else is bored by
Speaker 4: the question, or you know, maybe they're technological but not scientific.
Speaker 4: And then we asked, well, can we communicate with them?
Speaker 4: You know, can we figure out a way to have
Speaker 4: a mental mind meld about these things? Do they ask
Speaker 4: the same kind of questions that we ask?
Speaker 1: Are?
Speaker 4: Are we curious about the same things? Do they find
Speaker 4: and accept intuitively the same kind of answers? Would they
Speaker 4: even take the same path as we would? So rather
Speaker 4: than tackling this whole big question all at once, and
Speaker 4: the whole question and even its parts are essentially unanswerable,
Speaker 4: but to even make some progress, we thought it was
Speaker 4: useful to break it into some pieces.
Speaker 3: So let's look at a few of these pieces one
Speaker 3: by one. One of the earliest questions you look at
Speaker 3: in the book is the question do aliens wonder? Why
Speaker 3: do they even have the motivation to pursue scientific questions?
Speaker 3: It's hard for me to imagine that aliens would ever
Speaker 3: develop the ability to travel or communicate between stars without
Speaker 3: having something like science. Obviously, you can imagine us traveling
Speaker 3: out and going to other star systems and finding bacteria
Speaker 3: and other things that we wouldn't think of as technological
Speaker 3: intelligences but are live on other planets. But assuming that
Speaker 3: they are able to somehow get in contact with us,
Speaker 3: a desire to understand and model the principles of how
Speaker 3: reality works just seems like it would almost be a
Speaker 3: must have. But you came up with a hypothetical contact
Speaker 3: scenario to imagine this. Could you briefly describe kind of
Speaker 3: sketch the contact scenario and then talk about some reasons
Speaker 3: for thinking a species maybe could actually communicate between stars
Speaker 3: or travel between stars with out science.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is really counterintuitive. And when I first started
Speaker 4: digging into this, I also thought like, of course, you know,
Speaker 4: everybody out there is going to be doing science because
Speaker 4: they're gonna be curious about the universe, and science is
Speaker 4: the way to figure it out. But the more I
Speaker 4: talk to historians and philosophers, the more I understood that,
Speaker 4: you know, science has a lot of humanity in it,
Speaker 4: the structure, the institutions, the process, and it's fairly recent.
Speaker 4: It's something we've been doing, you know, in the way
Speaker 4: we call science for only a few centuries, which is
Speaker 4: a blip of time. And so it could be like
Speaker 4: an intermediate step towards something greater, a better way to
Speaker 4: learn about the universe. And so you know, it's not
Speaker 4: that I don't think that aliens are doing science. It's
Speaker 4: just that I wanted to make the strongest argument I
Speaker 4: could that maybe they aren't, because you know, deeply, because
Speaker 4: deep down, I feel like we're biased towards thinking aliens
Speaker 4: are going to be like us, the sort of star
Speaker 4: trek fallacy, like they're us with wrinkles on their forehead
Speaker 4: or with pointy ears, right, but fundamentally they're human, and
Speaker 4: I think that that's narrow minded.
Speaker 3: So I'm trying to break out of it.
Speaker 4: And you know, the book is an exercise essentially and
Speaker 4: convincing myself that aliens might be more alien than we imagine.
Speaker 4: And so your question is, like, is it possible to
Speaker 4: explore the stars to come visit Earth and not be scientific,
Speaker 4: to be deeply technological? And you only have to look
Speaker 4: back at a history on Earth to see that, like,
Speaker 4: we have technology, well before we have science, you know,
Speaker 4: people have been like fermenting yeast into bread and beer,
Speaker 4: which is you know, fairly technological without understanding anything about
Speaker 4: what was going on in it or people have been
Speaker 4: making swords, you know, which requires if you want to
Speaker 4: understand it, like pretty deep level knowledge of like solid
Speaker 4: state physics and metallurgy. But there were masters making incredible
Speaker 4: devices well before they understood why, and even people exploring
Speaker 4: the earth. Right if you say science began a few
Speaker 4: hundred years ago, well, humanity has been like venturing from
Speaker 4: shore to shore for thousands of years. And so I
Speaker 4: took that as an inspiration and try to come up
Speaker 4: with an example of how aliens might get here without
Speaker 4: being scientific. And I was thinking about a planet where
Speaker 4: you have some critters and they're floating through their oceans,
Speaker 4: and on their planet, the atmosphere is thicker than it
Speaker 4: is on ours, and so the boundary between the ocean
Speaker 4: and the atmosphere is a little fuzzier, and so it's
Speaker 4: not so crazy to imagine that they might stumble across
Speaker 4: some way to not just navigate their oceans, but also
Speaker 4: navigate their atmospheres, you know, just like we did. And
Speaker 4: in this case, these folks are like little bladders that
Speaker 4: can absorb, can emit air into order to go up,
Speaker 4: or accept ballasts to go down. They're like little submarines essentially,
Speaker 4: but they learned to navigate their atmosphere, and then it's
Speaker 4: not too big a leap to imagine that maybe they
Speaker 4: also figure out how to coat themselves in something so
Speaker 4: they can navigate above the atmosphere through their solar system.
Speaker 4: And in their solar system, they don't just have a star.
Speaker 4: They have a binary star system, one of which is
Speaker 4: a black hole. And so they spend millions of years
Speaker 4: like whizzing around this black hole, and they develop an
Speaker 4: intuitive understanding of space and curvature. So they don't have
Speaker 4: an Einstein who's given them an equation. They just have
Speaker 4: a feeling for curvature. You know, the way that curvature
Speaker 4: is very counterintuitive to us. It's like, weird to think
Speaker 4: about space being bent between here and there and distances
Speaker 4: are oscillating, and what It's very hard for people to
Speaker 4: really grock general relativity because we grew up in a
Speaker 4: place where we imagine space is always flat. It's always
Speaker 4: our experience. But what if you didn't, and what if
Speaker 4: you spent millions of years whizzing around a black hole
Speaker 4: and really experiencing curvature and somehow intuited your way into
Speaker 4: manipulating spatial curvature and traveling the stars, and so that
Speaker 4: was like hypothetical scenario to try to make a concrete
Speaker 4: to give an example of how aliens could arrive here
Speaker 4: with warped technology effectively and not be able to explain
Speaker 4: it to us because they're like, what do you mean? Like,
Speaker 4: here's how you do it? What do you mean why?
Speaker 3: How? That kind of thing does seem hard to imagine,
Speaker 3: But I like the way you really like put the
Speaker 3: work in to sketch it out and compare it to
Speaker 3: I mean, as you're saying, it seems like it would
Speaker 3: depend on a lot of trial and error, so it
Speaker 3: might be a much slower process than the progress of
Speaker 3: human science human technology. But a sort of branching question
Speaker 3: off of that is, do you think the desire to
Speaker 3: understand why, to ask the question why is a core
Speaker 3: feature of intelligence or could that be a specific feature
Speaker 3: of just human minds? You know, I was trying to
Speaker 3: think about this, and I had a suspicion that I
Speaker 3: don't know. I suspect that the question why has got
Speaker 3: to be pretty fundamental to intelligence because we define intelligence
Speaker 3: largely by the ability to solve problems or learn, which
Speaker 3: is almost always going to be accelerated by understanding underlying principles.
Speaker 3: But I don't know. I could definitely be missing things there.
Speaker 3: They are contingencies I'm not seeing.
Speaker 4: I think you put your finger on the deepest part
Speaker 4: of this question, and that's really what we're going to
Speaker 4: get an answer to when the aliens come, is how
Speaker 4: much overlap do we have with them? If they do
Speaker 4: wonder why the same way we do, then we're gonna
Speaker 4: have a lot in common and we're gonna be able
Speaker 4: to learn a lot from them. But if they don't,
Speaker 4: then it's going to tell us something. It's going to
Speaker 4: tell us that we are unusual in some way. And
Speaker 4: that's really my fantasy. I mean, I got into this thinking, Wow,
Speaker 4: it would be wonderful if aliens show up and they're
Speaker 4: basically just like us, but further ahead, because then we
Speaker 4: can zoom forward in science. But actually, I think that
Speaker 4: might be the most boring outcome. It might be the
Speaker 4: most amazing. We might learn the most, not necessarily about
Speaker 4: quantum field theory, but about the nature of humanity and
Speaker 4: intelligence and the experience of being alive in this universe.
Speaker 4: If they're so fundamentally weird and different that they're like,
Speaker 4: don't that these questions don't make sense to them, or
Speaker 4: they don't even ask these questions that they have another
Speaker 4: way of having a relationship with the universe. Because I
Speaker 4: agree with you, it feels like it's essential. It's part
Speaker 4: of being intelligent, building a model in your mind and
Speaker 4: probing that model and using it to solve your problem,
Speaker 4: even if that problem is like, hey, how do we
Speaker 4: take down this mammoth for dinner? Or you know, how
Speaker 4: do I solve this social problem with my neighbor, you know,
Speaker 4: which I think humans have been doing for hundreds of
Speaker 4: thousands of years. But it could be not. You know,
Speaker 4: it could be that that's as fundamental as like eating
Speaker 4: sweet things for breakfast. You know, the first time I
Speaker 4: went traveling and I was like, hmm, wow, people have
Speaker 4: like weird spicy fish soup for breakfast. I didn't even
Speaker 4: imagine that you could have other kinds of things for breakfast.
Speaker 4: Or the first time I saw like a toilet in
Speaker 4: a country where like you don't just sit, you know,
Speaker 4: I was like, oh, WHOA, mind blowing. There's so many
Speaker 4: areas where we can't imagine beyond our experience. And I'm
Speaker 4: hopeful when the aliens come that they're gonna blow our
Speaker 4: minds with their different way of having a relationship with
Speaker 4: the universe. One of my favorite hypotheticals is maybe they
Speaker 4: used to do science. Maybe science is some sort of
Speaker 4: primitive way of understanding the universe, and what they have
Speaker 4: is like, you know, science plus the way we think
Speaker 4: about natural philosophy, Like we look at Aristotle and we're like, cool, bro,
Speaker 4: you made a lot of progress just thinking about stuff.
Speaker 4: Why didn't you think about doing experiments? You know, empiricism
Speaker 4: is obvious, like, come on, just go outside and try
Speaker 4: it for ten minutes. Why argue for hours and hours
Speaker 4: and hours? It seems obvious to us. And in that way,
Speaker 4: maybe the aliens have upgraded their science. They're like, yeah,
Speaker 4: we used to do it that way, but then we
Speaker 4: came up with this other trick that's so much better.
Speaker 4: I can't believe you guys are still doing experiments or whatever.
Speaker 4: And so it could be that they don't do science
Speaker 4: because they've left it behind for something even more powerful.
Speaker 3: So another one of the questions you look at is
Speaker 3: assuming that aliens do ask the question why they do
Speaker 3: have some kind of scientific understanding, would we be able
Speaker 3: to communicate with them about it and you asked this
Speaker 3: in a number of different ways. I definitely want to
Speaker 3: get into the question of math in just a second.
Speaker 3: But before we look at math, I want to look
Speaker 3: at difficulties in basic just language communication. And you draw
Speaker 3: the analogy with difficulties in deciphering lost human languages. Could
Speaker 3: you talk a bit about that, and how illuminating that
Speaker 3: those kind of troubles we've faced in the past are.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is fun because you know, we haven't met
Speaker 4: aliens if we don't know what amiling language is like,
Speaker 4: so you can speculate endlessly. But I wanted to try
Speaker 4: to dig into something more concrete, and the best example
Speaker 4: we have of intelligent civilizations who are little alien to
Speaker 4: us are ancient human civilizations. So I thought, let's dig
Speaker 4: into what was it like to try to translate the
Speaker 4: writings of ancient intelligent human civilizations who are not around
Speaker 4: to explain it to us, because I thought that would
Speaker 4: be helpful to teach us, like what's important. How challenging
Speaker 4: is this? When do we succeed? When do we fail?
Speaker 4: And I'm kind of shocked to learn the answer, which
Speaker 4: was that this is a lot harder than I thought.
Speaker 4: I mean, these are humans, right, they have the same
Speaker 4: brain as we do, they live in the same world
Speaker 4: as we do, they have the same senses, the same environment.
Speaker 4: They have lots and they left us lots of examples,
Speaker 4: but in same cases, we still have not decoded their writing. Like, yes,
Speaker 4: we decoded ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, there's an important caveat in
Speaker 4: that story, but we have not, for example, decoded Etruscan writing.
Speaker 4: And the Etruscans like lived just a couple thousand years
Speaker 4: ago next to the Romans, and the Romans talk all
Speaker 4: about them, and we have lots of examples, and yet
Speaker 4: it still remains in undecipherable. It's incredible to me. It
Speaker 4: tells me that like the barrier to accessing another intelligence,
Speaker 4: even one hosted on the same substrate, is very, very challenging.
Speaker 4: And it hints that in order to make these mental connections,
Speaker 4: you need one essential thing, which is common context. You
Speaker 4: need to be able to like point at something and say,
Speaker 4: this is an apple, right, let's agree on the word apple,
Speaker 4: or you know, this is one, this is two, and
Speaker 4: you know, I read a really interesting set of articles
Speaker 4: by the folks at SETI or actually anthropologists analyzing SETI,
Speaker 4: and you know. Their conclusion essentially was that it's hopeless
Speaker 4: if the aliens communicate with us, if they send us
Speaker 4: a message SETI like, but they don't show up, so
Speaker 4: we can't like point to things and say here's an apple,
Speaker 4: here's a doughnut. That it's essentially impossible to decode just
Speaker 4: written language from an alien species because we have no
Speaker 4: idea what it's supposed to look like. How do you
Speaker 4: know when you've decoded it correctly? You have no clues,
Speaker 4: no handles. And the best example of that, I think
Speaker 4: is Egyptian hieroglyphics. You know, there is this famous story
Speaker 4: the Rosetta Stone. We had hieroglyphics, nobody could decode them.
Speaker 4: Then we found this cheat sheet, right, it's got Greek
Speaker 4: on it, and it's got the same stuff in hieroglyphics.
Speaker 4: Since you're like, oh, I know how to translate these
Speaker 4: words from one to the other, I can go from there,
Speaker 4: dot dot dot, I've cracked hieroglyphics. But that's not the
Speaker 4: way it happened. The way it happened is they found
Speaker 4: the Rosetta Stone and it still took them twenty years.
Speaker 4: Twenty years when they had examples of decoded text in
Speaker 4: both languages. Why did it take so long Because they
Speaker 4: were making a fundamentally mistaken assumption about the structure of hieroglyphics.
Speaker 4: They looked at hieroglyphics and they were like, oh, these
Speaker 4: are pictograms. The ones that are look like birds are
Speaker 4: mean birds someway. The ones that look like water mean
Speaker 4: water some way, but they're not. Egyptian hieroglyphics turn out
Speaker 4: to be phonetic in the same way that our language is,
Speaker 4: and so like a hieroglyphic means a sound, not an idea.
Speaker 4: They only realized this when they were doing a deep
Speaker 4: comparison with the Greek and they found some phrases in
Speaker 4: Greek that translated to sounds, and they noticed that these
Speaker 4: sounds were common across these across the translation. And so
Speaker 4: it was only because not only did they have examples
Speaker 4: of the translated Greek, but they understood how this Greek
Speaker 4: was spoken that they could crack this code. So the
Speaker 4: key was cultural context, just having something in common to
Speaker 4: sort of nail languages together. And the same is true
Speaker 4: of like Mayan. Mayan was cracked because there's still people
Speaker 4: speaking a variant of Mayan, and so understanding this like
Speaker 4: cultural expression. The way this is spoken and used is
Speaker 4: absolutely essential to cracking any sort of alien language. And
Speaker 4: so if we get a message from aliens like that
Speaker 4: would be awesome, but it's hard to know, like if
Speaker 4: it even is a message and what does it mean?
Speaker 4: Like the wow signal is a great example, like maybe
Speaker 4: we did get a message, don't know how to decode it,
Speaker 4: or maybe we're getting messages all the time, we don't
Speaker 4: even recognize them, right, And so unless aliens arrive and
Speaker 4: we can sit together and build some sort of cultural
Speaker 4: context to establish that real communication mind mild, I think
Speaker 4: it's going to be impossible.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you need the feedback, But I think the hieroglyphics
Speaker 3: is a great example of example to use because it's
Speaker 3: like what you're doing throughout the book is an example
Speaker 3: of where an assumption that was holding us back is
Speaker 3: invisible to us, and it's not until we realized we
Speaker 3: had the incorrect assumption that we can actually make progress.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and who knows how many more assumptions there are
Speaker 4: built and that we don't even recognize. It's not like
Speaker 4: we have a list of assumptions we can examine them
Speaker 4: and say, yeah, I'm pretty confident in those The problem
Speaker 4: is that we don't know where the edge of that
Speaker 4: box is because we don't even know how things might
Speaker 4: be different. You know what kind of breakfasts they eat
Speaker 4: in Alpha Centauri.
Speaker 3: So I want to go on to the other big
Speaker 3: part of the communication question. Obviously, if we're going to
Speaker 3: be sharing information about physic and the laws that govern
Speaker 3: reality with them, our main language for doing that is math.
Speaker 3: And so you have a question a chapter called does
Speaker 3: one plus one equal to everywhere? This starts with a
Speaker 3: fun contact scenario or contact hypothesis about contact that is
Speaker 3: made with a star that's alive, that's kind of bioplasma,
Speaker 3: but doesn't seem to respond to mathematical or numerical information.
Speaker 3: And so you asked the question, is it plausible that
Speaker 3: there could be an intelligent species that maybe even has
Speaker 3: technology in some way we could think about it, or
Speaker 3: at least has you know, capabilities of contact with another species,
Speaker 3: but it doesn't have a concept of counting and arithmetic,
Speaker 3: the most basic numerical thing that we think there is.
Speaker 3: Could you explore that a bit?
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is where it becomes clear if you're reading
Speaker 4: the book that the book really is about the philosophical question,
Speaker 4: you know, is science human or is it universal? And
Speaker 4: this really comes into focus because this is an ancient
Speaker 4: question of philosophy of math. Right, is math something that
Speaker 4: we've discovered or invented? Is it part of the universe
Speaker 4: or is it a shorthand for the way that we think?
Speaker 4: And it's a surprisingly difficult question, you know. On one hand,
Speaker 4: it seems like the universe is awfully mathematical, and there
Speaker 4: are great moments of discovery in the history of physics
Speaker 4: where math has led us to the answer. And you know,
Speaker 4: one of my favorites is pretty recent. It's the Higgs boson.
Speaker 4: You know. Peter Higgs was looking at the structure of
Speaker 4: quantum field theory and he noticed that these particles were
Speaker 4: very similar to the photon and the W and the z,
Speaker 4: but they were different. One of them had mass and
Speaker 4: one of them had no mass. And why is that?
Speaker 4: And anyway, how do you give masses to all the
Speaker 4: fundamental particles without breaking this other symmetry? And he came
Speaker 4: up with a mechanism, a mathematical mechanism. He said, you
Speaker 4: know what, this whole theory is missing a piece and
Speaker 4: clicks together only if you add this one more element.
Speaker 4: And so this is a purely mathematical observation saying like,
Speaker 4: there's a mathematical structure here, and it seems like it's
Speaker 4: missing something. Fifty years later, we go out and it's there.
Speaker 4: The Higgs boson is there in the universe. It's real.
Speaker 3: That's kind of spooky.
Speaker 4: It's spooky, right, And there's all these great quotes from physicists,
Speaker 4: you know, like Stephen Weinberg saying that physicists often discover
Speaker 4: that mathematicians have been there before them, you know, and
Speaker 4: it goes back deeper like Maxwell. Maxwell. Maxwell was assembling
Speaker 4: the equations of electromagnetism and he noticed lots of beautiful symmetry,
Speaker 4: but he also noticed, hmm, hold on a second, this
Speaker 4: would be more symmetrical if we added one piece. But
Speaker 4: you can't just like add something to the laws of
Speaker 4: physics because it's prettier. And yet when he went out
Speaker 4: there to find if there is an element of the
Speaker 4: universe that corresponds to this missing piece, he found, oh.
Speaker 3: Yes, it is.
Speaker 4: It just had been overlooked. So again the math guided him.
Speaker 4: And to me, that's really powerfully suggestive to say, like, wow,
Speaker 4: the universe isn't described by math. It runs on math,
Speaker 4: like it is fundamentally mathematical. And I remember having this
Speaker 4: moment where I personally came to believe that as an
Speaker 4: undergrad learning like quantum mechanics and hearing about like bells
Speaker 4: inequality and all these experiments, and I was like, Wow,
Speaker 4: this is too accurate to be approximate, too accurate to
Speaker 4: just be a description, right, this is the rules, This
Speaker 4: is the source code of the universe. So I used
Speaker 4: to deeply, deeply believe that. But you know, the more
Speaker 4: you dig into the philosophy of math, the more you
Speaker 4: realize this sits on a bunch of assumptions, assumptions which
Speaker 4: sound plausible, but when you dig into them, like do
Speaker 4: we really have good arguments for them? And as you say,
Speaker 4: some of them relate to like arithmetic. In the last
Speaker 4: couple of hundreds of years, philosophers of math have asked
Speaker 4: questions like, well, what are the basic foundations of math?
Speaker 4: Like what are the starting rules the few things you
Speaker 4: need to assume from which you can build everything else.
Speaker 4: And the goal of that is it's not just like, hey,
Speaker 4: let's be nerdy and figure out what the rules are,
Speaker 4: but like, let's examine those assumptions and wonder like could
Speaker 4: they have been something else? You know, the way we
Speaker 4: might like see the fundamental equation of the universe and
Speaker 4: ask like is it this way it? Could it have
Speaker 4: been the other way? You learned something by seeing the
Speaker 4: fundamental nature written down, And in the last couple hundred
Speaker 4: years we've learned We've made a lot of progress, Like wow.
Speaker 4: Most of mathematics is based on arithmetic, and arithmetic itself
Speaker 4: is based on a few basic axioms. They're called p
Speaker 4: and O's axioms, and those can be described in terms
Speaker 4: of set theory, like you know, this is inside that,
Speaker 4: and a barber who shaves themselves can shave other barbers
Speaker 4: or whatever. But at the core of it, there's a
Speaker 4: question mark, like Godal's theorem tells us that we can't
Speaker 4: describe everything in math using those fundamental axioms. And then
Speaker 4: even if you have a bunch of fundamental axioms, there
Speaker 4: are always going to be things that aren't captured by it.
Speaker 4: You know, there are things in arithmetic that are true
Speaker 4: that cannot be with our axioms, which tells you like,
Speaker 4: maybe we don't really fundamentally understand what's at the core
Speaker 4: of mathematics.
Speaker 3: Is it possible to do physics without numbers? You explore
Speaker 3: at least one scholar who's attempted to, I think, put
Speaker 3: together a version of Newton's laws of motion or gravitation
Speaker 3: without using numbers. You make it sound like it's kind
Speaker 3: of difficult and painful.
Speaker 4: I love this book. It's not easy to read. It's
Speaker 4: like not written for a popular audience. It's written for
Speaker 4: like nerds of philosophy. So I'll be honest, it was
Speaker 4: hard for me to get through it and to really
Speaker 4: digest it. But it's a great book. It's called Science
Speaker 4: Without Numbers. It's by heartree Field, and it's really an
Speaker 4: effort to give an example of like do we need
Speaker 4: mathematics or is it just really useful? And he puts
Speaker 4: together an alternative theory of gravity. You know, he starts
Speaker 4: with Newton's theory, which you can write in terms of
Speaker 4: like a gravitational potential and gravitational field, which is very handy.
Speaker 4: And newton theory famously has an equation in it and
Speaker 4: you can like calculate things with numbers, and he's like,
Speaker 4: do we need that or is that just really helpful?
Speaker 4: So he put together this theory of gravity with no numbers,
Speaker 4: there is no gravitational field. He says, you can't observe
Speaker 4: that directly anyway. All you see is motion of particles.
Speaker 4: So maybe that's just like an intermediate step that's useful
Speaker 4: to us. And then he's like, maybe you don't need
Speaker 4: numbers at all. Maybe you don't need to say the
Speaker 4: field has a value here, and you know this has
Speaker 4: this the son has a mass of this number. Maybe
Speaker 4: all you need are relationships. You know, this one has
Speaker 4: more mass than the other one, this is a greater
Speaker 4: distance than that one. If he structure in terms of relationships,
Speaker 4: he was able to recover the not the equationance of
Speaker 4: motion right, because it's not like he's not dealing with numbers,
Speaker 4: but a description of the behavior gravitationally without using Newton's
Speaker 4: theory and without using any numbers. So in the philosophy
Speaker 4: of mass, this approach is called nominalism. Essentially says that
Speaker 4: numbers are something we made up. You know, one, two, four,
Speaker 4: They don't exist anywhere in the world, like where is
Speaker 4: the number four? It's a sort of a hilarious philosophy
Speaker 4: question that you could just brush off. It's like, well,
Speaker 4: it sounds like you've been smoking too many banana peels.
Speaker 4: But you know, if four exists outside of human knowledge
Speaker 4: and before us, then like where is it? It's sort
Speaker 4: of a reasonable question, Like, you know, if it's part
Speaker 4: of the universe, it should have a location. Everything else
Speaker 4: that's part of the universe has a location. So maybe
Speaker 4: it's just something we constructed to help us think about stuff.
Speaker 4: And so it's pretty hard to growck like a theory
Speaker 4: of physics without math, And that's his point. His point
Speaker 4: is like, look, math is very useful, but that doesn't
Speaker 4: mean it's necessary the way like, yes, having a car
Speaker 4: in Los Angeles is very useful, but you could walk
Speaker 4: everywhere it would be a huge pain. Right, It's obviously
Speaker 4: an advantage, but it doesn't mean it's fundamental. And that
Speaker 4: opens up the door to like, well, maybe aliens found
Speaker 4: some other way to think. Maybe math reflects the way
Speaker 4: our minds work instead of the way the universe works,
Speaker 4: and if alien minds work differently, they might come up
Speaker 4: with something else we wouldn't call math. Or if aliens
Speaker 4: evolved in a similar situation where they have bodies that
Speaker 4: are easy to distinguish and so counting makes sense, and
Speaker 4: they have like you know, interesting economies that are similar
Speaker 4: hours they might have evolved the similar concepts. So it
Speaker 4: comes down to essentially how much we have in common
Speaker 4: with them evolutionarily and conceptually, whether or not we think
Speaker 4: they might have math, but it's definitely not necessary. And
Speaker 4: even here on Earth. I was surprised when I was
Speaker 4: doing my research to learn that different cultures here on
Speaker 4: Earth have different relationships with counting. You know, you might
Speaker 4: look at a bunch of stuff on a desk and
Speaker 4: I can ask you like, oh, how many things are
Speaker 4: on the desk, and you say, oh, there's four things.
Speaker 4: But somebody who's Japanese, for example, they have different categories
Speaker 4: of counting, and they would never group together things that
Speaker 4: are like long and thin with things that are like
Speaker 4: flat and short, So like pencils CDs on a desk,
Speaker 4: they would say, oh, there's two pencils and two CDs.
Speaker 4: You can't say that's four things because they're different categories, right,
Speaker 4: And that's a hint where you can dig in and say, like, well,
Speaker 4: when do we group things together? Like why do I
Speaker 4: say this four things? What is the category of a thing?
Speaker 4: Like why do I say these things are similar enough
Speaker 4: that I can call them a thing? And in the end,
Speaker 4: that's a bit of an arbitrary distinction. Like if you
Speaker 4: look at a bunch of apples on a table, I
Speaker 4: could say there's ten apples, or I could say, well,
Speaker 4: there's this apple, and there's that apple, and there's the
Speaker 4: other apple, and they're all unique apples and so on
Speaker 4: what basis am I saying they're all the same? That's culture,
Speaker 4: that's I'm saying the differences are not important, and that's arbitrary.
Speaker 4: And like, I'm probably right there are ten apples, Like
Speaker 4: I'm not saying every apple really is fundamentally different. But
Speaker 4: when you discover that the lines you're drawing are arbitrary,
Speaker 4: then that makes you wonder whether other people are drawing
Speaker 4: different arbitrary lines. And again, this isn't like to say
Speaker 4: matth is useless or anything. It's just to point out
Speaker 4: that there are cracks here, that there are assumptions we're
Speaker 4: making that are human that might be made differently elsewhere.
Speaker 3: Okay, you ask some other really interesting questions along these
Speaker 3: lines about how our thinking versus alien thinking might influence
Speaker 3: different ways that we could relate to the universe or
Speaker 3: that science could arise. One is you talk about differences
Speaker 3: in perception like native sensory capabilities, and how that could
Speaker 3: probably determine what kinds of questions and answers make sense.
Speaker 3: Maybe we can come back to that, because I want
Speaker 3: to get to your question about your chapter on do
Speaker 3: aliens argue about planets? I found this really interesting because
Speaker 3: I don't think I ever considered it this way. But
Speaker 3: you start here with a contact hypothetical about the inhabitants
Speaker 3: of a subsurface ocean on Jupiter's moon Europa, who see
Speaker 3: everything in terms of eddy is kind of swirling swarms
Speaker 3: of matter in motion, and that that's as fundamental to
Speaker 3: their physical view of reality as the idea of particles
Speaker 3: and discrete objects is to us. I thought that was
Speaker 3: really interesting, the idea that we could meet with another
Speaker 3: spec And of course, from here you build up the
Speaker 3: idea that we could meet with this other speci we
Speaker 3: could both have science and both be able and willing
Speaker 3: to communicate with each other, but end up finding each
Speaker 3: other's physical metaphors for describing reality uninteresting and not very useful.
Speaker 3: I don't think I don't think i'd ever that had
Speaker 3: never entered my mind. So could you elaborate on that?
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, the goal here is like identify the
Speaker 4: assumptions that underpin our science and wonder if they could
Speaker 4: be different. And one of my goals in writing this
Speaker 4: book was to bring to more popular awareness that there's
Speaker 4: like a raging philosophical debate about some of these things
Speaker 4: that a lot of people aren't even aware of. And
Speaker 4: one of them is this principle of emergence. You know,
Speaker 4: essentially asked the question, why can you make chicken soup
Speaker 4: with out understanding quantum gravity? Like we don't understand the
Speaker 4: fundamental nature of the universe, for sure, we don't, you know,
Speaker 4: like we've zoomed down to electrons and quarks and whatever.
Speaker 4: We know that's not the final story, and we don't
Speaker 4: know how far below that is the final story? Is
Speaker 4: there even a final story? And yet people have been
Speaker 4: like calculating how to lob cannon balls over castle walls
Speaker 4: for a long time. And people live in the world,
Speaker 4: and you know, we have very fancy technology that describes
Speaker 4: the behavior of transistors and all this sorts of stuff.
Speaker 4: Why is it possible to understand the world without understanding
Speaker 4: the basic rules of it. There's this sort of magic
Speaker 4: trick that all of our science relies on and it's
Speaker 4: called emergence, and it says that the universe seems to
Speaker 4: operate at different levels, and you can understand the universe
Speaker 4: at sort of our level without knowing the details of
Speaker 4: what's going on inside. Right. We've been able to do
Speaker 4: biology and chemistry well before we were even doing particle physics, right,
Speaker 4: So it's not like everybody was waiting. I know, particle
Speaker 4: physicists tell us what is the rules so that we
Speaker 4: can then extrapolate upwards to biology. Like you could just
Speaker 4: go ahead and do biology, you can go ahead and
Speaker 4: do chemistry, you can do lots of classical physics. But
Speaker 4: why does that happen? Why is that even possible? You know,
Speaker 4: if I told you I'm going to make up a
Speaker 4: bunch of random, arbitrary rules for the way the universe
Speaker 4: works at it a fundamental level, you might think, okay, well,
Speaker 4: what are the consequences then for the macroscopic scale, you know,
Speaker 4: And it turns out it's weird that you don't have
Speaker 4: to know the microscopic to understand the macroscopic And that's
Speaker 4: the thing that makes me wonder if we don't know
Speaker 4: why that works. And this is a deep question in
Speaker 4: philosophy why does simplicity emerge from you know, complexity and chaos.
Speaker 4: Then how do we know we're not imposing it on
Speaker 4: the universe. How do we know there's not a cultural
Speaker 4: bias where we're like, well, there's a seeding mass of
Speaker 4: chaos out there in the universe, and we're selecting the
Speaker 4: things that are interesting to us because they're relevant to us,
Speaker 4: and they come out of the way we live, and
Speaker 4: we're expressing the universe in terms.
Speaker 3: Of those things.
Speaker 4: And so I chose this question of planets because talking
Speaker 4: to a mathematician friend of mine early on in his book,
Speaker 4: he was like, yeah, well, but I mean, aliens are
Speaker 4: going to agree with us about like there are planets
Speaker 4: and stars and galaxies. I'm gonna have some scientific cultural
Speaker 4: touch points. And I was like, well, I don't know,
Speaker 4: maybe what if they didn't evolve on a planet so
Speaker 4: they don't see like rocks through space as fundamental. I mean,
Speaker 4: one way to understand this is like, think about how
Speaker 4: we describe the Solar System. Is it to scale? It
Speaker 4: never is. Whenever you see a description of the Solar System,
Speaker 4: it takes the planets and it zooms them way out
Speaker 4: of proportion. Somebody looking at that would be like, whoa dude,
Speaker 4: you're kind of biased towards planets here, Like, really, planets
Speaker 4: are irrelevant dust compared to the Sun. So if you're
Speaker 4: an alien species that evolves like in a solar atmosphere,
Speaker 4: you're going to think it's awfully weird that we think
Speaker 4: about solar systems the way that we do, where planets
Speaker 4: are front and send. And as I make the argument
Speaker 4: in the book, we don't even have a good definition
Speaker 4: of what a planet is. I mean, we've been arguing
Speaker 4: about it for decades and the definition we have is
Speaker 4: pretty absurd. And it's the reason, like for all this
Speaker 4: kerfuffle about Pluto, it's because we wanted to protect this category.
Speaker 4: We wanted to have something special that made us feel important.
Speaker 4: And anytime we've done that in the history of science,
Speaker 4: you know, like the Earth is the center of the universe,
Speaker 4: the Earth is the center of the Solar system, it's
Speaker 4: always led us down the wrong path. And so it's
Speaker 4: hard to imagine aliens who don't understand planets and don't
Speaker 4: think about the universe in terms of rocks orbiting stars.
Speaker 4: But if they evolve in subsurface oceans, maybe they just
Speaker 4: think about you know, little chaotic vortices and they build
Speaker 4: up their explanation of the universe from that. So that's
Speaker 4: what this chapter is about. And I had a lot
Speaker 4: of fun talking to philosophers about emergence and realized that
Speaker 4: I had a lot of assumptions about the way emergence works. Like,
Speaker 4: for example, I assumed that the universe has fundamental level,
Speaker 4: that there is some firmament where the rules are set
Speaker 4: and everything emerges from that, and maybe we don't know
Speaker 4: exactly how, and it's complicated the way that like hurricanes
Speaker 4: are complicated, but we think they follow rules, but that's
Speaker 4: not necessarily true. Like what if there is no firmament.
Speaker 4: What if it's just like layers of emergence all the
Speaker 4: way down, or what if you know, they don't follow
Speaker 4: from below, maybe things don't bubble upwards. Maybe every layer
Speaker 4: has its own set of laws that are somehow independent.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of basic philosophical assumptions you make when
Speaker 4: you take a sort of particle physics point of view.
Speaker 3: There that gets into your chapter, also about the idea
Speaker 3: that maybe there are no underlying laws of physics, but
Speaker 3: also just at the base level of you know, the
Speaker 3: objects we deal with when we're talking about planets and particles.
Speaker 3: There was a great example in this chapter where you're
Speaker 3: trying to illuminate the different zoom settings. I think a
Speaker 3: lot of people will be familiar with the idea that, yeah,
Speaker 3: chemistry maybe is an approximation and you can get more
Speaker 3: exact if you go down into particle physics. And of course,
Speaker 3: you know, hire biology is more of an approximation. It's
Speaker 3: based on emergence. But I think a lot of people
Speaker 3: would have that in their head, but think, well, when
Speaker 3: you get down to you know, particles, that's the base level.
Speaker 3: But I love the example you use in the book
Speaker 3: of the charge of the electron and how actually, while
Speaker 3: we have a good approximation for how that works, that
Speaker 3: still relies on zoom settings. Could you explain that example.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I wanted to dig into this because I think
Speaker 4: a lot of people think about the way you just
Speaker 4: described that they imagine that eventually you can get down
Speaker 4: to the fundamental truth, right And like number one, we
Speaker 4: don't know if there is and the zoomi ist bit
Speaker 4: that we have so far is still kind of a myth.
Speaker 4: Like I make fun of astronomers having a silly definition
Speaker 4: of planet, but like definition of a particle is much
Speaker 4: much more of a mess philosophically, you get ten particle
Speaker 4: theorists in a room and you ask them what is
Speaker 4: a particle, You're gonna get ten answers like it's crazy,
Speaker 4: Like this concept is historical, it's intuitive for us. It
Speaker 4: comes out of our need to describe the universe in
Speaker 4: terms of like little bits of stuff, and in many
Speaker 4: ways I think it's holding us back. You know, we
Speaker 4: have a glimpse now in quantum field theory that things
Speaker 4: work differently, but we're still sort of like clinging to
Speaker 4: this idea.
Speaker 3: Anyway.
Speaker 4: The current idea of a particle is hard to describe
Speaker 4: because particles are never by themselves. Like you think of
Speaker 4: an electron as a tiny dot with a negative charge
Speaker 4: on it. Cool little ball, Yeah, people think a little ball, right,
Speaker 4: and there it is. There's your intuition, your classical intuition.
Speaker 4: I live in the universe with rocks and little bits
Speaker 4: of stuff, and so everything is made out of little
Speaker 4: bits of stuff, right. It's the way you might laugh
Speaker 4: at the ancient Greeks, and we're still doing it. But
Speaker 4: you think of the electron, even if you like think, well,
Speaker 4: it's not a ball.
Speaker 3: Of stuff.
Speaker 4: It's a point, right, and it's got negative sign on it.
Speaker 4: And where does that negative sign come from? Well, we
Speaker 4: measure it in experiments, right, we know the charge of
Speaker 4: the electron. We have the famous oil drop experiment that
Speaker 4: told us the mass to charge ratio, et cetera. But
Speaker 4: is that the charge of the electron itself? Because the electron,
Speaker 4: because it has a charge, is always interacting with the
Speaker 4: electromagnetic field. It makes a field and as it moves,
Speaker 4: that field ripples, and so the right way to describe
Speaker 4: an electron either as in terms of a field around it,
Speaker 4: or equivalently as a cloud of virtual photons. Right, Photons
Speaker 4: are ripples and the electromagnetic field. And so from the
Speaker 4: particle point of view, you have the electron. It's surrounded
Speaker 4: by this cloud of virtual photons, and those virtual photons
Speaker 4: change the charge that you measure. So when you're measuring
Speaker 4: the charge of the electron, you're not measuring the charge
Speaker 4: of the pure, bare electron. You're measuring the charge of
Speaker 4: the electron plus this cloud of photons. Because photons can
Speaker 4: fluctuate into like electrons and positrons, you have this cloud
Speaker 4: of charged particles, and say electrons charge polarizes that cloud,
Speaker 4: And depending on how far into that cloud you go,
Speaker 4: you get a different answer for what is the charge
Speaker 4: that we measure? So really, far away from the cloud,
Speaker 4: you get the charge that we know in loud that
Speaker 4: Ben Franklin discovered and that we measured one hundred years ago.
Speaker 4: But if you start to probe into that cloud, then
Speaker 4: you're not seeing as much of those photons. You're getting
Speaker 4: through it closer to the bare electron, closer to the
Speaker 4: real truth of the electrons charge, and you get a
Speaker 4: more negative number. And the deeper you probe intowards that cloud,
Speaker 4: the more you're not being affected by those particles, the
Speaker 4: more negative that number gets. And if you extrapolate, what
Speaker 4: would it be like if you went all the way
Speaker 4: through the cloud, you went all the way to to
Speaker 4: the electron, what number would you measure for the charge
Speaker 4: of the electron? The answer is negative infinity?
Speaker 3: Like what.
Speaker 4: This is another example in physics where you get a
Speaker 4: nonsense answer that tells you that, like your theory has
Speaker 4: been pushed beyond its region of applicability. Right, it makes sense.
Speaker 4: We're not saying the electron really does have a negative charge.
Speaker 4: We're saying the concept of the electron on its own
Speaker 4: with the charge, that is not an appropriate way to
Speaker 4: think about what's happening. Really, electrons are always tied together
Speaker 4: with photons. We're making this arbitrary dotted line between the
Speaker 4: electrons and the photons because we like to think of
Speaker 4: it that way, But fundamentally these two are so deeply
Speaker 4: interwoven that it doesn't make sense to imagine the charge
Speaker 4: of the electron by itself. So even this concept of
Speaker 4: a particle like the fundamental basis of all of our
Speaker 4: particle physics, and we think the universe and even if
Speaker 4: the electron isn't, we think that our particles within it. Right,
Speaker 4: this basic unit of our imagination is something that's not
Speaker 4: really an appropriate description of the universe. And so that
Speaker 4: to me smells of humanity, of cultural choices, of being
Speaker 4: linked to our intuition, the preference, the way that we
Speaker 4: like to hear the answers, and so the language that
Speaker 4: we express ourselves in. And I wonder if aliens argue
Speaker 4: about particles and argue about planets, and it would be amazing,
Speaker 4: It'd be amazing if they didn't, if they came with
Speaker 4: a completely different way of expressing and explaining the universe.
Speaker 4: That would be mind blowing. That's my real fantasy.
Speaker 3: Well, that actually does tie into a later chapter, the
Speaker 3: one where you're talking about alternative alien science. Could there
Speaker 3: be completely different theories of everything, complete theories of physics
Speaker 3: that both correctly predict the behavior of all matter, energy,
Speaker 3: and space time, and yet they're different theories. Is that
Speaker 3: actually possible? Are two different theories that always make the
Speaker 3: exact same predictions actually equivalent?
Speaker 4: Yeah, So this is a great example, Like, this is
Speaker 4: a question philosophers have been debating for decades and decades
Speaker 4: that's basically unknown in physics. Like I think most physicists
Speaker 4: and most people out there imagine if if you find
Speaker 4: a theory that works and is simple and it's basic,
Speaker 4: like say string theory figures it out and they have
Speaker 4: one equation and it describes everything and it predicts every
Speaker 4: experiment and it all works, then people are like, okay,
Speaker 4: well you're done right, Like that's it. But there's an
Speaker 4: assumption there that there is a unique description, that there's
Speaker 4: only one description, one way to answer this question, and
Speaker 4: it actually makes a lot more sense to imagine that
Speaker 4: there might be multiple descriptions. I mean, like consider anytime
Speaker 4: you have data. You measure something, you have a few
Speaker 4: data points, and then you try to describe it, describe
Speaker 4: it by like drawing a line through it. Maybe it's
Speaker 4: a straight line, maybe it's a wiggly line. Maybe you
Speaker 4: have all some model you're fitting to your data. That
Speaker 4: model is describing things between your data points that you
Speaker 4: have not observed. And even if you take infinite amounts
Speaker 4: of data, there will always be multiple models that fit
Speaker 4: the data. So it actually kind of makes sense to imagine, hm,
Speaker 4: you could have multiple ways to describe the same universe,
Speaker 4: and I think this conflicts with your natural intuition. They're like, yeah,
Speaker 4: but there's a true answer. You know, the universe runs
Speaker 4: some way and we just have to figure it out.
Speaker 4: And maybe we're right, or maybe the aliens are right,
Speaker 4: and maybe our theory of quantum fields is wrong and
Speaker 4: maybe their theory of quantum fields is right or whatever.
Speaker 4: But there is a truth. And that's a philosophical assumption
Speaker 4: saying that there's a single objective truth that we could
Speaker 4: discover and it's unique. How do you know? You know,
Speaker 4: you don't know. That's exactly the kind of philosophical assumption
Speaker 4: I want to sort of reveal in this book, And
Speaker 4: I'm not saying that we don't. I'm not saying that
Speaker 4: there isn't, but I'm saying that we can't be sure.
Speaker 4: And you know, there's lots of arguments in philosophy that
Speaker 4: say that there very well could be. And there's lots
Speaker 4: of great historical examples. You know, the history of our
Speaker 4: physics is the history of overthrowing one way of thinking
Speaker 4: about the universe for another one. You know, when Einstein
Speaker 4: upgraded on understanding of gravity, didn't just give us better
Speaker 4: equations that were more accurate, he completely revised the story
Speaker 4: of what's happening. You know, it's not masses pulling on
Speaker 4: each other. It's space itself is bending and curving, and
Speaker 4: gravity is not even a force. So there is this
Speaker 4: history of overthrowing our ideas which suggests that there are
Speaker 4: other ideas out there which could better or at least
Speaker 4: equivalently describe the universe that we see, that we could
Speaker 4: conceive of right now. If you are a super genius,
Speaker 4: you could sit down and come up with another way
Speaker 4: to describe gravity or quantum fields or whatever that's equivalent
Speaker 4: or superior. And so it's certainly possible to have multiple
Speaker 4: theories and so in the literature they argue about this,
Speaker 4: and there's a whole group of people like this is
Speaker 4: skuy Norton who says that any alternative theory is quote
Speaker 4: merely the same theory dressed in different clothes.
Speaker 3: Right that as you.
Speaker 4: Say, look, okay, maybe you have fields and we have shmields,
Speaker 4: but they must be equivalent, because if they're doing the
Speaker 4: same thing, right, if they're making the same predictions, how
Speaker 4: can they really be different? And you know, we don't
Speaker 4: know the answer to that because nobody has an alternative
Speaker 4: like this is theoretical philosophers say it should be possible,
Speaker 4: and other philosophers say, like, all right, show us you
Speaker 4: know what are you talking about. Where is this alternative?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 4: And we don't have that. So all we can do
Speaker 4: is look at our history, and we have some fascinating
Speaker 4: examples there, like you know, Newtonian mechanics was supplanted by
Speaker 4: Lagrangeen mechanics and Hamiltonian mechanics, which is a different way
Speaker 4: to think about like how things move. If you want
Speaker 4: to calculate, you know, how does the ball move with
Speaker 4: the parabola, you can use Newtonian mechanics, and we do that.
Speaker 4: You know, f equals MA, and that works. But as
Speaker 4: soon as it gets complicated, you have your ball and
Speaker 4: a string, and a string is being held by a
Speaker 4: squirrel and the squirrels on a roller coaster. It's way
Speaker 4: too hard to use Newton's laws like it just becomes unsolvable.
Speaker 4: So these clever guys, Lagrange and Hamilton came up with
Speaker 4: with more effective mechanics that rely essentially on energy as
Speaker 4: the fundamental principle, and you can derive Newton's laws from them.
Speaker 4: And lagrange And mechanics and Hamiltonian mechanics are very similar,
Speaker 4: but they're all so different, and you can use both
Speaker 4: of them to describe these things. And for like more
Speaker 4: than one hundred years, people have been arguing about are
Speaker 4: these two theories just the same dressed in different clothes
Speaker 4: or are they fundamentally different? And the last ten years
Speaker 4: or twenty years or so they've been digging into, like, well,
Speaker 4: what does it mean to be different? You know, this
Speaker 4: is the way philosophy makes progress. They're like, well, what
Speaker 4: is the meaning of the word is mean?
Speaker 3: Anyway?
Speaker 4: So it gets pretty nerdy and abstract, but fundamentally we
Speaker 4: don't know. We don't know if it's possible to have
Speaker 4: multiple theories that describe the universe equivalently and are fundamentally
Speaker 4: categorically different, that they tell different conceptual stories, or if
Speaker 4: both being effective means that they fundamentally have to be
Speaker 4: telling the same story. We just don't know. And we
Speaker 4: have examples on the other side, you know, like quantum mechanics,
Speaker 4: we had matrix equations and we had wave equations. You know,
Speaker 4: Schrodinger and Heisenberg and von Neumann showed Okay, guys, these
Speaker 4: are actually the same thing, you know, just you have
Speaker 4: different operators and different kinds of math, and they seem
Speaker 4: pretty different, but actually they are the same, which is
Speaker 4: kind of hilarious because Schortinger and Heisenberg famously sort of
Speaker 4: hated each other and really didn't like the other's approached, Like, oh,
Speaker 4: I find it gross.
Speaker 2: But.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's some German dissing the in the
Speaker 4: academic literature which is pretty fun to read. But they
Speaker 4: are fundamentally the same. So you can show that's not
Speaker 4: two theories, right, that is just one theory expressed in
Speaker 4: different clothing. So that would be fascinating, right. When the
Speaker 4: aliens show up with their theory, it might be very different,
Speaker 4: and we might be able to show that it's essentially
Speaker 4: the same, or we might discover, wow, this is a
Speaker 4: very different story about what's happening in the universe. It
Speaker 4: really is a different way to explain things that that
Speaker 4: can't be mapped to ours. And what would that mean?
Speaker 4: You know, what would that mean If the universe has
Speaker 4: multiple correct descriptions, it means something about the nature of truth, right,
Speaker 4: But what is really happening? If there is anything you
Speaker 4: can say is really happening.
Speaker 3: So I think one reason people are tempted to think
Speaker 3: that aliens would have science and it would be similar
Speaker 3: to us, similar to our science, is because when we,
Speaker 3: at least I have this experience, I think a lot
Speaker 3: of people do. When you look back on scientific history,
Speaker 3: you somehow get this feeling that it's kind of faded,
Speaker 3: that it's like on track, maybe because it's not because
Speaker 3: it feels like different than like artistic you know, creations
Speaker 3: where it's like they're they are the scientific discoveries and
Speaker 3: history are bound by nature, and so because they're discovering
Speaker 3: things about nature just kind of feels inevitable that it
Speaker 3: would have developed in the way that it did. Could
Speaker 3: you talk about some reasons for thinking that actually the
Speaker 3: history of human science is somewhat contingent, and how that
Speaker 3: could undermine our belief that aliens would develop science along
Speaker 3: the same tracks.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is really fun. I got to dig into
Speaker 4: a lot of the history here, and I agree with you.
Speaker 4: I used to think of the history of science as inevitable.
Speaker 4: I played civilization, for example, and you know, you have
Speaker 4: to develop this, and then gunpowdern then you can build this,
Speaker 4: and it feels sort of like a natural progression. But
Speaker 4: you know, there's a lot of moments in the history
Speaker 4: of science that were random, that were accidental, where we
Speaker 4: discovered something that we could have discovered much earlier, and
Speaker 4: it could have totally changed the path of our science.
Speaker 4: And this is one of the reasons I wrote the
Speaker 4: book in the structure I did with this Drake equation
Speaker 4: structure because it let me make some assumptions, like at
Speaker 4: this point in the book and say, all right, let's
Speaker 4: push aside all of the philosophical questions. Let's assume aliens
Speaker 4: do science, they use math, they ask the same questions,
Speaker 4: they're interested in the same stuff as us. Even then,
Speaker 4: how similar or different might their science be? Or like,
Speaker 4: take aliens out of the equation. Imagine running the earth
Speaker 4: a million times, you know, and even start from like
Speaker 4: humans have formed one hundred thousand years ago, When do
Speaker 4: they become technological? How long does that take? What does
Speaker 4: that civilization look like? What science do they develop? Are
Speaker 4: we typically late or early compared to that population? Boy,
Speaker 4: I would love to know the answer to that question.
Speaker 4: You know, what is the path of science in all
Speaker 4: of those different earths? And so we can't know that,
Speaker 4: but we do have some glimmers. You know. I was
Speaker 4: able to like dig into ancient human civilizations Mayans and
Speaker 4: Chinese and the Greeks before they really talk to each other.
Speaker 4: It's sort of like a little mini experiment to compare
Speaker 4: proto scientific development to see how similar it was.
Speaker 3: But actually where we together?
Speaker 4: You asked about like more recent developments. One of my
Speaker 4: favorites is the discovery of X rays, which was, you know,
Speaker 4: essentially just accidental. Guy left a source on top of
Speaker 4: a photographic sheet, came back over the weekend, found this thing,
Speaker 4: He wrote it up, published it the next day. Beat
Speaker 4: some English guy by I.
Speaker 3: Got his wife to stick her hand in front of it.
Speaker 4: Exactly, and you know, made this discovery and all the
Speaker 4: tools were there, Like people have been using uranium for
Speaker 4: a long time, and we had photography for a while,
Speaker 4: so you could have discovered that much much earlier. It
Speaker 4: was really just an accident. And so I like to imagine, well,
Speaker 4: what if we had what if we had made that
Speaker 4: discovery decades or centuries earlier, because that discovery is what
Speaker 4: kicked off like the Cures and their analysis of radiation,
Speaker 4: and then you know Rutherford and his analysis of the
Speaker 4: nucleus and like basically quantum mechanics. Right, that was the
Speaker 4: moment that kicked off everything that led to quantum mechanics.
Speaker 4: What if that had happened one hundred years earlier? What
Speaker 4: if little Einstein was taught quantum mechanics in the crib,
Speaker 4: then when he was developing his theory of general relativity,
Speaker 4: would he have come up with some quantum version. I mean,
Speaker 4: it's just one example, but it shows you how randomness
Speaker 4: affects the development of our science and it could have
Speaker 4: taken us on different paths. And so the fact that
Speaker 4: we're stuck right now unifying quantum mechanics and gravity and
Speaker 4: that even Einstein wasn't able to do it, maybe it's
Speaker 4: because we started too late with quantum mechanics, and if
Speaker 4: quantum mechanics was more intuitive to the smarty pants in
Speaker 4: the last one hundred years, maybe we would have made
Speaker 4: more progress. Or maybe there's some other crazy and kind
Speaker 4: of obvious discovery we haven't made yet, and on all
Speaker 4: the other earths they have and so they're like way
Speaker 4: far ahead of us because we just haven't like stumbled
Speaker 4: across XYZ, you know. Or maybe we're very far ahead
Speaker 4: and most earths they're still using stone tools. Who knows,
Speaker 4: but it would certainly affect what it's like to talk
Speaker 4: to aliens, you know. Are they on the same single
Speaker 4: path that we are on? Are there multiple paths up
Speaker 4: this sort of mountain to figure out the nature of
Speaker 4: the universe? And where did their path diverge? You know,
Speaker 4: did they start totally differently from us or did they
Speaker 4: just like randomly discover things in a different order. Really
Speaker 4: really fascinating to learn that, And so that's why I
Speaker 4: dug into the sort of ancient history. You know, were
Speaker 4: the Mayans being mathematical? If the Mayans, for example, had
Speaker 4: not been devastated by the Spanish, what would their mathematics
Speaker 4: and science be like right now? That would be fascinating
Speaker 4: to know it's such a tragedy. You know, they might
Speaker 4: have a very different way to think about the universe
Speaker 4: and to express it. They certainly were on the road
Speaker 4: to doing that. When the Europeans got there. Their predictions
Speaker 4: for like motions of stars and moons were more accurate
Speaker 4: than the European predictions. So you know, we certainly lost
Speaker 4: a whole thread there.
Speaker 3: Okay, if your game for this, here's the part where
Speaker 3: I would like you to speculate. I want you to
Speaker 3: voice your hunches. If you have a guess or a
Speaker 3: suspicion about what is most likely the limiting factor in
Speaker 3: the original Drake equation, Like which of those variables you know,
Speaker 3: maybe multiple, but which of them is most likely to
Speaker 3: be near zero and is the reason we're not hearing
Speaker 3: from anybody? And then secondly, what do you think is
Speaker 3: most likely to be the filter preventing the alien physics conference.
Speaker 4: Yeah, my hunch, again not scientifically, is that there's life
Speaker 4: everywhere in the universe, that it's all over. You know
Speaker 4: that maybe the fraction of planets that have life is small,
Speaker 4: but it can't be that small, you know, it doesn't
Speaker 4: seem like we're that special. So I think there's probably
Speaker 4: at least microbial life everywhere. How often do you get
Speaker 4: like complex multicellular life, know, But I still my hunch
Speaker 4: is that the denominator is big enough to tolerate a
Speaker 4: small fraction, and that the final result is still going
Speaker 4: to be large. So I'm going to imagine that the
Speaker 4: universe is filled with technological aliens, and you know, we
Speaker 4: haven't heard from them because we don't understand their signals,
Speaker 4: or because you know, time and space have prevented them
Speaker 4: from coming here or communicating with us. So I think that,
Speaker 4: you know, we're starting from a good number. I think
Speaker 4: that when they do arrive, that we are going to
Speaker 4: be shocked by how human are science is. I mean,
Speaker 4: I think I persuaded myself when I was writing this
Speaker 4: book that there's a lot of assumptions we're making that
Speaker 4: you know, they're not going to have coffee and croissants
Speaker 4: for breakfast. They're going to be so much weirder than
Speaker 4: we imagine. Because even on Earth, life is always weirder
Speaker 4: than we imagine. We're always discovering super weird, gunky stuff,
Speaker 4: and so it's sort of it's really just hubris to
Speaker 4: imagine that our way way of thinking and our way
Speaker 4: of doing things is the only way, is the best
Speaker 4: way to me. It's equivalent to like geocentrism, you know,
Speaker 4: to put ourselves at the center of the intellectual universe
Speaker 4: and say this is the only way. And I'm looking
Speaker 4: forward to that. I want my mind blown. I want
Speaker 4: it to be bizarre and difficult. I want it to
Speaker 4: take decades to understand what they're even talking about and
Speaker 4: how they think about things, because then we're going to
Speaker 4: learn something about ourselves, not just the aliens. We're gonna
Speaker 4: learn about what's unusual about us. Where do we stand,
Speaker 4: what is weird about being human? And it's going to
Speaker 4: help define what it means to be human and to
Speaker 4: be a human scientist. This is how we think about things,
Speaker 4: This is how we ask about things. These are kind
Speaker 4: of answers that we find satisfying and that we accept
Speaker 4: and don't ask more questions about. And these are the
Speaker 4: things that drive us and make us curious. You know,
Speaker 4: So I think, I hope, I guess I have a hunch,
Speaker 4: and I hope that aliens do science in a much
Speaker 4: weirder way than anybody imagines that even is imagined in
Speaker 4: this book, right, I don't claim that what we've described
Speaker 4: in this book spans the whole space of ideas. I
Speaker 4: just want to give people a flavor that there are
Speaker 4: many ideas out there that we haven't even imagined because
Speaker 4: we might not have the capacity to think outside of
Speaker 4: our little box.
Speaker 3: The book is called Do Aliens Speak Physics? Daniel Whitson,
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 4: Thank you very much, super funing conversation. Thank you.
Speaker 1: All right.
Speaker 3: So much appreciation to Daniel Whitson for joining us today.
Speaker 3: The book Do Aliens Speak Physics is slated for release
Speaker 3: on November fourth, twenty twenty five, but you can pre
Speaker 3: order your copy now. And if you want to check
Speaker 3: out Daniel's podcast, it is called Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.
Speaker 3: If you're new to the show, Stuff to Blow Your
Speaker 3: Mind is a science and culture podcast with core episodes
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