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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My

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Speaker 2: name is Joe McCormick. Today on the podcast, we're going

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Speaker 2: to be featuring an interview in which I talked to

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Speaker 2: returning show guest physicist Daniel Whitson about his upcoming book,

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Speaker 2: Do Aliens Speak Physics. Daniel shared in advance copy of

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Speaker 2: this book with me and I think it's great. It

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Speaker 2: is a fascinating book length thought experiment that is full

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Speaker 2: of insights about what could be universal and what could

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Speaker 2: be unique in surprising ways about human intelligence, science, language, mathematics,

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Speaker 2: and culture. A bit of bio about Daniel. Daniel Whitson

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Speaker 2: is a particle physicist and physics professor. He's the co

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Speaker 2: host of the podcast Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe and

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Speaker 2: co author of We Have No Idea, also co creator

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Speaker 2: of the PBS kids show Eleanor Wonders Why. His book,

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Speaker 2: Do Aliens Speak Physics? Is co written and illustrated by

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Speaker 2: Andy Warner. And now onto my conversation with Daniel. Daniel Whitson,

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Speaker 2: Welcome back to the show.

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Speaker 3: Thanks so much for having me on. Excited to talk

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Speaker 3: to you. Again.

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Speaker 2: So the book is do aliens speak physics? And I

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Speaker 2: have really really been enjoying this book. I planned to

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Speaker 2: finish it with a full read for today, but my

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Speaker 2: last night, my toddler was having some sleep disturbances. That

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Speaker 2: was an all night thing, so I was rushing to

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Speaker 2: get through the last couple chapters. Maybe you can fill

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Speaker 2: me in with the greater detail that I missed in

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Speaker 2: the skimming of the last two or three.

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Speaker 3: Maybe you should have read the book to you toddler

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Speaker 3: to help put them to sleep.

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Speaker 2: Maybe I think she would really like the illustrations actually,

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Speaker 2: but the problem is I had digital version, so that

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Speaker 2: would involve showing it to her on a screen, which

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Speaker 2: is a whole other thing. You know, that just turns

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Speaker 2: into want to see other things on the screen. So

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Speaker 2: can't wait for my print copy. That'll be slighting. But

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Speaker 2: I guess we should start with the elevator pitch. What

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Speaker 2: is the central question you're exploring in this book.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, the question the book asks is whether aliens do science,

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Speaker 3: and specifically physics, the same way we do. You know,

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Speaker 3: when aliens arrive, can they just tell us the secrets

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Speaker 3: of the universe? Can they leap us forward a thousand,

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Speaker 3: a million, a billion years into the scientific future. Is

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Speaker 3: science really just one track that way, one line and

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Speaker 3: we could just sort of like skip forward, you know,

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Speaker 3: with the benefits of all their time and energy. Or

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Speaker 3: is science more complicated? Is it multiple paths? Are there

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Speaker 3: multiple solutions? Do aliens even do science? So this book

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Speaker 3: is an exploration essentially of like how universal is our

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Speaker 3: theory of physics? Is what we're learning something about the

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Speaker 3: universe or is it something about the way we think?

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Speaker 3: Or both? And can we try to figure that out

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Speaker 3: before the aliens arrive.

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Speaker 2: One of the metaphors or kind of shorthand that you

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Speaker 2: use in the book is the idea of an interplanetary

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Speaker 2: physics conference. You're asking the question, if we ever make

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Speaker 2: you undeniable contact with an alien species, can we get

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Speaker 2: our heads together and communicate meaningfully about the laws of physics?

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Speaker 2: And so to illustrate those kinds of meetings. One thing

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Speaker 2: I really liked about your book is that each chapter

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Speaker 2: comes with what you call a contact hypothetical, where you

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Speaker 2: kind of tell a little story. There's some fiction writing

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Speaker 2: in this book. It's mostly you know, nonfiction scientific writing

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Speaker 2: and philosophical writing. But I like these little fictional scenarios,

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Speaker 2: and I think we might want to get into a

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Speaker 2: couple of these as we go along. But before we

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Speaker 2: do that, to sort of frame how you explore the

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Speaker 2: question of do aliens speak physics? And could we communicate

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Speaker 2: about physics with them? You extend the classic Drake equation,

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Speaker 2: So could you explain that? Maybe first explain what the

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Speaker 2: original Drake equation is and how it works, and then

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Speaker 2: also explain the way you extend it and the terms

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Speaker 2: you added to it to get at this alien physics

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Speaker 2: conference question.

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Speaker 3: Yes, so the Alien Physics Conference is in there because

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Speaker 3: it's a literal fantasy of mine, you know. I mean

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Speaker 3: I got into physics to understand the universe and I

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Speaker 3: want to figure it out. But sometimes I feel like, gosh,

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Speaker 3: progress is frustratingly slow, and you know what if there

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Speaker 3: are aliens out there that just have the answers, It's

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Speaker 3: so tantalizing and frustrating to think that, like somebody out

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Speaker 3: there has figured out what is quantum gravity? How do

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Speaker 3: you build wormholes? How did the universe begin? Like somebody

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Speaker 3: maybe knows these answers and they could just tell us,

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Speaker 3: beam them to us, email us your textbooks, you know, imagine,

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Speaker 3: you know, Newton getting to read Einstein's a relativity theory,

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Speaker 3: or you know, Aristotle getting to read modern physics, like

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Speaker 3: that could be us. Wow, so that's in there because

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Speaker 3: that's my literal, like I can taste it, but you know,

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Speaker 3: I also wonder if it's really true, and so I

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Speaker 3: sort of The book is a meditation on like, all right, Daniel,

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Speaker 3: calm down, Maybe those answers aren't actually out there. And

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Speaker 3: we wrote those little fictional interludes to try to give

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Speaker 3: like more concrete examples rather than just thinking theoretically about

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Speaker 3: the nature of physics and the structure of and the

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Speaker 3: philosophical underpinnings, like let's walk through what it might be

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Speaker 3: like to give people a concrete example. And also we

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Speaker 3: didn't want to tackle the whole question at once, like

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Speaker 3: it's a lot of pieces, and so we were inspired

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Speaker 3: by the way Drake took apart the question of are

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Speaker 3: there aliens out there? And why haven't we heard from them?

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Speaker 3: He broke that into pieces, and he starts by calculating

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Speaker 3: how many stars are in the universe, what fraction of

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Speaker 3: those stars might have life, what fraction of stars with

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Speaker 3: life develop civilization? How long do those civilizations. Last, it's

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Speaker 3: a classic approach in science. You have a problem that's

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Speaker 3: too big to solve, so you break it into a

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Speaker 3: bunch of pieces, none of which you maybe can solve,

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Speaker 3: but some of which you can make a little bit

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Speaker 3: of progress on. So you're not completely steymied by your

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Speaker 3: inability to make progress in one area because you can

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Speaker 3: move in another area. And for example, we now know

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Speaker 3: that there are lots and lots of stars in the universe.

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Speaker 3: Every galaxy that's out there has like hundreds of billions

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Speaker 3: of stars, and there's hundreds of billions of galaxies, so

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Speaker 3: the number of stars out there just in the observable

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Speaker 3: universe is very, very vast, and shockingly, we've made progress

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Speaker 3: on other aspects like how many planets does an average

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Speaker 3: star have? And the answer again is surprisingly big. You know,

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Speaker 3: there's a lot of uncertainty there and depends on how

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Speaker 3: you define earth like planet, but like something like twenty

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Speaker 3: five percent of stars out there have rocky planets that

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Speaker 3: are you know, earth like according to some definition, So

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Speaker 3: we're talking a huge number of earth like planets in

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Speaker 3: the universe. But you know, the Drake equation is multiplicative

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Speaker 3: the number of aliens that contact us is the number

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Speaker 3: of stars times the fraction that have life, times the

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Speaker 3: fraction that are technological, et cetera. So if any of

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Speaker 3: those numbers are zero, were screwed, and we don't know

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Speaker 3: what fraction of those planets have life, and what fraction

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Speaker 3: of that life becomes technological, and how long that life lasts.

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Speaker 3: So that's the structure of the Drake equation, and we

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Speaker 3: thought it was a natural thing to do to extend

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Speaker 3: that to answer the question how many alien civilizations are

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Speaker 3: there out there that we can talk science with? And

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Speaker 3: so to do that we broke it into several questions.

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Speaker 3: We said, well, what fraction them do science? You know,

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Speaker 3: is that even a thing aside of Earth is science

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Speaker 3: like a human endeavor? Maybe everybody else is bored by

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Speaker 3: the question, or you know, maybe they're technological but not scientific.

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Speaker 3: And then we asked, well, can we communicate with them,

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Speaker 3: you know, can we figure out a way to have

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Speaker 3: a mental mind meld about these things? Do they ask

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Speaker 3: the same kind of questions that we ask? Are are

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Speaker 3: we curious about the same things? Do they find and

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Speaker 3: accept intuitively the same kind of answers? Would they even

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Speaker 3: take the same path as we would So rather than

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Speaker 3: tackling this whole big question at once, and the whole

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Speaker 3: question and even its parts are essentially unanswerable, but to

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Speaker 3: even make some progress, we thought it was useful to

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Speaker 3: break it into some pieces.

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Speaker 2: So let's look at a few of these pieces one

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Speaker 2: by one. One of the earliest questions you look at

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Speaker 2: in the book is the question do aliens wonder? Why

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Speaker 2: do they even have the motivation to pursue scientific questions.

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Speaker 2: It's hard for me to imagine that aliens would ever

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Speaker 2: develop the ability to travel or communicate between stars without

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Speaker 2: having something like science. Obviously, you can imagine us traveling

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Speaker 2: out and going to other star systems and finding bacteria

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Speaker 2: and other things that we wouldn't think of as technological

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Speaker 2: intelligences but are live on other planets. But assuming that

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Speaker 2: they are a to somehow get in contact with us,

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Speaker 2: a desire to understand and model the principles of how

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Speaker 2: reality works just seems like it would almost be a

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Speaker 2: must have. But you came up with a hypothetical contact

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Speaker 2: scenario to imagine this. Could you briefly describe kind of

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Speaker 2: sketch the contact scenario and then talk about some reasons

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Speaker 2: for thinking a species maybe could actually communicate between stars

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Speaker 2: or travel between stars without science.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, this is really counterintuitive. And when I first started

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Speaker 3: digging into this, I also thought like, of course, you know,

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Speaker 3: everybody out there is going to be doing science because

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Speaker 3: they're gonna be curious about the universe and science is

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Speaker 3: the way to figure it out. But the more I

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Speaker 3: talk to historians and philosophers, the more I unders you know,

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Speaker 3: science has a lot of humanity in it, the structure,

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Speaker 3: the institutions, the process, and it's fairly recent. It's something

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Speaker 3: we've been doing, you know, in the way we call

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Speaker 3: science for only a few centuries, which is a blip

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Speaker 3: of time, and so it could be like an intermed

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Speaker 3: it stepped towards something greater, a better way to learn

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Speaker 3: about the universe. And so, you know, it's not that

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Speaker 3: I don't think that aliens are doing science. It's just

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Speaker 3: that I wanted to make the strongest argument I could

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Speaker 3: that maybe they aren't because you know, deeply, because deep down,

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Speaker 3: I feel like we're biased towards thinking aliens are going

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Speaker 3: to be like us, the sort of star trek fallacy,

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Speaker 3: like they're us with wrinkles on their forehead or with

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Speaker 3: pointy ears. Right, But fundamentally they're human, and I think

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Speaker 3: that that's narrow minded. So I'm trying to break out

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Speaker 3: of it. And you know, the book is an exercise

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Speaker 3: essentially convincing myself that aliens might be more alien than

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Speaker 3: we imagine. And so your question is, like, is it

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Speaker 3: possible to explore the stars, to come visit Earth and

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Speaker 3: not be scientific, to be deeply technological? And you only

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Speaker 3: have to look back at a history on Earth to

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Speaker 3: see that, Like, we have technology, well before we have science.

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Speaker 3: You know, people have been like fermenting yeast into bread

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Speaker 3: and beer, which is you know, fairly technological without understanding

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Speaker 3: anything about what was going on in it. Or people

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Speaker 3: have been making swords, you know, which requires if you

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Speaker 3: want to understand it, like pretty deep level knowledge of

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Speaker 3: like solid state physics and metallurgy. But there were masters

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Speaker 3: making incredible devices well before they understood why, and even

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Speaker 3: people exploring the earth. Right if you say science began

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Speaker 3: a few hundred years ago, well, humanity has been like

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Speaker 3: venturing from shore to shore for thousands of years. And

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Speaker 3: so I took that as an inspiration and try to

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Speaker 3: come up with an example of how aliens might get

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Speaker 3: here without being scientific. And I was thinking about a

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Speaker 3: planet where you have some critters and they're floating through

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Speaker 3: their oceans, and on their planet, the atmosphere is thicker

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Speaker 3: than it is on ours, and so the boundary between

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Speaker 3: the ocean and the atmosphere is a little fuzzier, and

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Speaker 3: so it's not so crazy to imagine that they might

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Speaker 3: stumble across some way to not just navigate their oceans,

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Speaker 3: but also navigate their atmospheres, you know, just like we did.

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Speaker 3: And in this case, these folks are like little bladders

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Speaker 3: that can absorb, can emit air into order to go up,

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Speaker 3: or accept ballast to go down. They're like little submarines essentially,

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Speaker 3: but they learn to navigate their atmosphere, and then it's

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Speaker 3: not too big a leap to imagine that maybe they

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Speaker 3: also figure out how to coat themselves in something so

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Speaker 3: they can navigate above the atmosphere through their solar system.

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Speaker 3: And in their solar system, they don't just have a star.

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Speaker 3: They have a binary star system, one of which is

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Speaker 3: a black hole, and so they spend millions of years

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Speaker 3: like whizzing around this black hole, and they develop an

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Speaker 3: intuitive understanding of space and curvature, so they don't have

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Speaker 3: an Einstein who's given them an equation. They just have

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Speaker 3: a feeling for curvature, you know, the way that curvature

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Speaker 3: is very counterintuitive to us. It's like, weird to think

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Speaker 3: about space being bent between here and there and distances

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Speaker 3: are oscillating, and what It's very hard for people to

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Speaker 3: really grock general relativity because we grew up in a

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Speaker 3: place where we imagine space is always flat. It's always

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Speaker 3: our experience. But what if you didn't, and what if

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Speaker 3: you spent millions of years whizzing around a black hole

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Speaker 3: and really experiencing curvature and somehow intuited your way into

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Speaker 3: manipulating spatial curvature and traveling the stars. And so that

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Speaker 3: was like hypothetical scenario to try to make a concrete

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Speaker 3: to give an example of how aliens could arrive here

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Speaker 3: with warped technology effectively and not be able to explain

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Speaker 3: it to us because they're like, what do you mean? Like,

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Speaker 3: here's how you do it? What do you mean why?

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Speaker 3: How Like.

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Speaker 2: That kind of thing does seem hard to imagine, But

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Speaker 2: I like the way you really like put the work

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Speaker 2: in to sketch it out and compare it to I mean,

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Speaker 2: as you're saying it seems like it would depend on

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Speaker 2: a lot of trial and error, so it might be

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Speaker 2: a much slower process than the progress of human science

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Speaker 2: human technology. But a sort of branching question off of

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Speaker 2: that is, do you think the desire to understand why

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Speaker 2: to ask the question why is a core feature of

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Speaker 2: intelli or could that be a specific feature of just

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Speaker 2: human minds? You know, I was trying to think about this,

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Speaker 2: and I had a suspicion that I don't know. I

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Speaker 2: suspect that the question why has got to be pretty

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Speaker 2: fundamental to intelligence, because we define intelligence largely by the

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Speaker 2: ability to solve problems or learn, which is almost always

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Speaker 2: going to be accelerated by understanding underlying principles.

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Speaker 1: But I don't know.

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Speaker 2: I could definitely be missing things there. There are contingencies

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Speaker 2: I'm not seeing.

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Speaker 3: I think you put your finger on the deepest part

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Speaker 3: of this question, and that's really what we're going to

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Speaker 3: get an answer to when the aliens come, is how

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Speaker 3: much overlap do we have with them? If they do

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Speaker 3: wonder why the same way we do, then we're going

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Speaker 3: to have a lot in common and we're gonna be

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Speaker 3: able to learn a lot from them. But if they don't,

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Speaker 3: then it's going to tell us something. It's going to

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Speaker 3: tell us that we are unusual in some way. And

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Speaker 3: that's really my fantasy. I mean, I got into this thinking, Wow,

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Speaker 3: it would be wonderful if aliens show up and they're

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Speaker 3: basically just like us, but further ahead, because then we

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Speaker 3: can zoom forward in science. But actually, I think that

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Speaker 3: might be the most boring outcome. It might be the

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Speaker 3: most amazing. We might learn the most, not necessarily about

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Speaker 3: quantum field theory, but about the nature of humanity and

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Speaker 3: intelligence and the experience of being alive in this universe.

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Speaker 3: If they're so fundamentally weird and different that they're like,

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Speaker 3: don't that these questions don't make sense to them, or

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Speaker 3: they don't even ask these questions, that they have another

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Speaker 3: way of having a relationship with the universe. Because I

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Speaker 3: agree with you, it feels like it's essential. It's part

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Speaker 3: of being intelligent, building a model in your mind and

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Speaker 3: probing that model and using it to solve your problem,

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Speaker 3: even if that problem is like, hey, how do we

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Speaker 3: take down this mammoth for dinner? Or you know, how

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Speaker 3: do I solve this social problem with my neighbor? You know,

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Speaker 3: which I think humans have been doing for hundreds of

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Speaker 3: thousands of years. But it could be not you know,

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Speaker 3: it could be that that's as fundamental as like eating

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Speaker 3: sweat things for breakfast. You know, the first time I

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Speaker 3: went traveling and I was like, hmm, wow, people have

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Speaker 3: like weird spicy fish soup for breakfast. I didn't even

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Speaker 3: imagine that you could have other kinds of things for breakfast.

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Speaker 3: Or the first time I saw like a toilet in

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Speaker 3: a country where like you don't just sit, you know,

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Speaker 3: I was like, oh, whoa mind blowing. There's so many

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Speaker 3: areas where we can't imagine beyond our experience, and I'm

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Speaker 3: hopeful when the aliens come that they're going to blow

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Speaker 3: our minds with their different way of having a relationship

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Speaker 3: with the universe. One of my favorite hypotheticals is maybe

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Speaker 3: they used to do science. Maybe science is some sort

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Speaker 3: of primitive way of understanding the universe, and what they

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Speaker 3: have is like you know, science plus the way we

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Speaker 3: think about natural philosophy, Like we look at Aristotle and

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Speaker 3: we're like, cool, bro, you made a lot of progress

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Speaker 3: just thinking about stuff. Why didn't you think about doing experiments?

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Speaker 3: You know, empiricism is obvious, like come on, just go

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Speaker 3: outside and try it for ten minutes. Why argue for

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Speaker 3: hours and hours and hours. It seems obvious to us.

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Speaker 3: And in that way, maybe the Aliens have upgraded their science, like, yeah,

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Speaker 3: we used to do it that way, but then we

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Speaker 3: came up with this other trick that's so much better.

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Speaker 3: I can't believe you guys are still doing experiments or whatever.

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Speaker 3: And so it could be that they don't do science

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Speaker 3: because they've left it behind for something even more powerful.

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Speaker 2: So another one of the questions you look at is

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Speaker 2: assuming that aliens do ask the question why they do

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Speaker 2: have some kind of scientific understanding, would we be able

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Speaker 2: to communicate with them about it? And you asked this

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Speaker 2: in a number of different ways. I definitely want to

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Speaker 2: get into the question of math in just a second.

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Speaker 2: But before we look at math, I want to look

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Speaker 2: at difficulties in basic just language communication. And you draw

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Speaker 2: the analogy with differentficulties in deciphering lost human languages. Could

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Speaker 2: you talk a bit about that and how illuminating that

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Speaker 2: those kind of troubles we've faced in the past are.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, this is fun because you know, we haven't met aliens.

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Speaker 3: If we don't know what Amilien language is like so

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Speaker 3: you can speculate endlessly, but I wanted to try to

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Speaker 3: dig into something more concrete. And the best example we

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Speaker 3: have of intelligent civilizations who are a little alien to

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Speaker 3: us are ancient human civilizations. So I thought, let's dig

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Speaker 3: into what was it like to try to translate the

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Speaker 3: writings of ancient intelligent human civilizations who are not around

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Speaker 3: to explain it to us, because I thought that would

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Speaker 3: be helpful to teach us, like what's important. How challenging

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Speaker 3: is this? When do we succeed? When do we fail?

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Speaker 3: And I'm kind of shocked to learn the answer, which

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Speaker 3: was that this is a lot harder than I thought.

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Speaker 3: I mean, these are humans, right, they have the same

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Speaker 3: brain as we do, they live in the same world

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Speaker 3: as we do, they have the same senses, that's the

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Speaker 3: same environment, and they have lots and they left us

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Speaker 3: lots of examples. But in some cases we still have

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Speaker 3: not decoded their writing. Like, yes, we decoded ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics,

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Speaker 3: there's an important caveat in that story, but we have not,

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Speaker 3: for example, decoded Etruscan writing. And the Etruscan's like lived

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Speaker 3: just a couple thousand years ago next to the Romans,

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Speaker 3: and the Romans talk all about them, and we have

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Speaker 3: lots of examples, and yet it still remains, you know, undecipherable.

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Speaker 3: It's incredible to me. It tells me that like the

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Speaker 3: barrier to accessing another intelligence, even one hosted on the

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Speaker 3: same substrate, is very, very challenging. And it hints that

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Speaker 3: in order to make these mental connections you need one

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Speaker 3: essential thing, which is common context. You need to be

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Speaker 3: able to like point at something and say, this is

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Speaker 3: an apple, right, let's agree on the word apple, or

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Speaker 3: you know, this is one, this is two. And you know,

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Speaker 3: I read a really interesting set of articles by the

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Speaker 3: folks at SETI, or actually anthropologists analyzing SETI, and you know,

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Speaker 3: their conclusion essentially was that it's hopeless if the aliens

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Speaker 3: communicate with us, if they send us a message SETI like,

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Speaker 3: but they don't show up, so we can't like point

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Speaker 3: to things and say, here's an apple, here's a doughnut.

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Speaker 3: That it's essentially impossible to decode just written language from

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Speaker 3: an alien species because we have no idea what it's

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Speaker 3: supposed to look like. How do you know when you've

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Speaker 3: decoded it correctly? You have no clues, no handles, and

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Speaker 3: the best example of that, I think is Egyptian hieroglyphics.

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Speaker 3: You know, there's this famous story the Rosetta Stone. They

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Speaker 3: had hieroglyphics, nobody could decode them. Then we found this

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Speaker 3: cheat sheet, right, it's got Greek on it, and it's

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Speaker 3: got the same stuff in hieroglyphics. Since you're like, oh,

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Speaker 3: I know how to translate these words from one to

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Speaker 3: the other, I can go from there, do dot dot,

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Speaker 3: I've cracked hieroglyphics. But that's not the way it happened.

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Speaker 3: The way it happened is they found the Rosetta Stone,

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Speaker 3: and it still took them twenty years. Twenty years when

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Speaker 3: they had examples of decoded text in both languages. Why

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Speaker 3: did it take so long Because they were making a

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Speaker 3: fundamentally mistaken assumption about the structure of hieroglyphics. They looked

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Speaker 3: at hieroglyphics and they were like, oh, these are pictograms.

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Speaker 3: The ones that look like birds are mean birds, someway.

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Speaker 3: The ones that looked like water mean water some way,

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Speaker 3: but they're not. Egyptian hieroglyphics turn out to be phonetic

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Speaker 3: in the same way that our language is, and so

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Speaker 3: like a hieroglyphic means a sound, not an idea. They

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Speaker 3: only realized this when they were doing a deep comparison

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Speaker 3: with the Greek and they found some phrases in Greek

396
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Speaker 3: that translated to sounds, and they noticed that these sounds

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Speaker 3: were common across these across the translation. And so it

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Speaker 3: was only because not only did they have examples of

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Speaker 3: the translated Greek, but they understood how this Greek was spoken,

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Speaker 3: that they could crack this code. So the key was

401
00:21:55,200 --> 00:21:58,679
Speaker 3: cultural context, was having something in common to sort of

402
00:21:58,800 --> 00:22:01,840
Speaker 3: nail languages to get other And the same is true

403
00:22:01,840 --> 00:22:05,280
Speaker 3: of like Mayan. Mayan was cracked because there's still people

404
00:22:05,320 --> 00:22:09,119
Speaker 3: speaking a variant of Mayan, and so understanding this like

405
00:22:09,320 --> 00:22:12,840
Speaker 3: cultural expression, the way this is spoken and used, is

406
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Speaker 3: absolutely essential to cracking any sort of alien language. And

407
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Speaker 3: so if we get a message from aliens like that

408
00:22:18,720 --> 00:22:22,240
Speaker 3: would be awesome, but it's hard to know, like even

409
00:22:22,359 --> 00:22:23,800
Speaker 3: as a message and what does it mean, Like the

410
00:22:23,840 --> 00:22:26,159
Speaker 3: wow signal is a great example, like maybe we did

411
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Speaker 3: get a message, we just don't know how to decode it,

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Speaker 3: or maybe we're getting messages all the time we don't

413
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Speaker 3: even recognize them, right, And so unless aliens arrive and

414
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Speaker 3: we can sit together and build some sort of cultural

415
00:22:37,440 --> 00:22:40,920
Speaker 3: context to establish that real communication. Mind mild, I think

416
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Speaker 3: it's going to be impossible.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, you need the feedback, but I think the hieroglyphics

418
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Speaker 2: is a great example of example to use because it's like,

419
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Speaker 2: what you're doing throughout the book is an example of

420
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Speaker 2: where an assumption that was holding us back is invisible

421
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Speaker 2: to us. And it's not until we realized we had

422
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Speaker 2: the incorrect assumption that we can actually make progress.

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Speaker 3: And who knows how many more assumptions there are built

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Speaker 3: in that we don't even recognize. It's not like we

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Speaker 3: have a list of assumptions we can examine them and say, yeah,

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Speaker 3: I'm pretty confident in those. The problem is that we

427
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Speaker 3: don't know where the edge of that box is because

428
00:23:14,920 --> 00:23:17,560
Speaker 3: we don't even know how things might be different. You

429
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Speaker 3: know what kind of breakfasts they eat in Alpha Centauri.

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Speaker 2: So I want to go on to the other big

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Speaker 2: part of the communication question. Obviously, if we're going to

432
00:23:25,240 --> 00:23:28,560
Speaker 2: be sharing information about physics and the laws that govern

433
00:23:28,640 --> 00:23:32,119
Speaker 2: reality with them, our main language for doing that is math.

434
00:23:32,920 --> 00:23:35,720
Speaker 2: And so you have a question a chapter called does

435
00:23:35,800 --> 00:23:39,600
Speaker 2: one plus one equal to everywhere? This starts with a

436
00:23:39,640 --> 00:23:44,919
Speaker 2: fun contact scenario or contact hypothesis about contact that is

437
00:23:44,960 --> 00:23:48,320
Speaker 2: made with the star that's alive, that's kind of bioplasma,

438
00:23:48,760 --> 00:23:52,600
Speaker 2: but doesn't seem to respond to mathematical or numerical information.

439
00:23:53,880 --> 00:23:57,320
Speaker 2: And so you asked the question, is it plausible that

440
00:23:57,359 --> 00:24:01,000
Speaker 2: there could be an intelligent species that maybe even has

441
00:24:01,160 --> 00:24:04,359
Speaker 2: technology in some way we could think about it, or

442
00:24:04,359 --> 00:24:07,640
Speaker 2: at least has you know, capabilities of contact with another species,

443
00:24:08,000 --> 00:24:11,440
Speaker 2: but it doesn't have a concept of counting and arithmetic,

444
00:24:11,520 --> 00:24:15,840
Speaker 2: the most basic numerical thing that we think there is.

445
00:24:16,440 --> 00:24:17,520
Speaker 2: Could you explore that a bit.

446
00:24:18,119 --> 00:24:20,880
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is where it becomes clear if you're reading

447
00:24:20,920 --> 00:24:24,240
Speaker 3: the book that the book really is about the philosophical question.

448
00:24:24,600 --> 00:24:28,840
Speaker 3: You know, is science human or is it universal? And

449
00:24:28,880 --> 00:24:31,159
Speaker 3: this really comes into focus because this is an ancient

450
00:24:31,240 --> 00:24:34,479
Speaker 3: question of philosophy of math. Right, is math something that

451
00:24:34,520 --> 00:24:37,720
Speaker 3: we've discovered or invented? Is it part of the universe

452
00:24:38,040 --> 00:24:40,280
Speaker 3: or is it a shorthand for the way that we think?

453
00:24:40,880 --> 00:24:44,840
Speaker 3: And it's a surprisingly difficult question. You know, on one hand,

454
00:24:45,480 --> 00:24:49,320
Speaker 3: it seems like the universe is awfully mathematical, and there

455
00:24:49,320 --> 00:24:52,480
Speaker 3: are great moments of discovery in the history of physics

456
00:24:52,720 --> 00:24:55,720
Speaker 3: where math has led us to the answer. And you know,

457
00:24:55,880 --> 00:24:58,800
Speaker 3: one of my favorites is pretty recent. It's the Higgs boson.

458
00:24:59,400 --> 00:25:01,879
Speaker 3: You know, Peter Higgs was looking at the structure of

459
00:25:02,000 --> 00:25:06,280
Speaker 3: quantum field theory and he noticed that these particles were

460
00:25:06,359 --> 00:25:08,480
Speaker 3: very similar, the photon and the W and the z,

461
00:25:09,320 --> 00:25:11,159
Speaker 3: but they were different. One of them had mass and

462
00:25:11,200 --> 00:25:12,920
Speaker 3: one of them had no mass. And why is that?

463
00:25:13,040 --> 00:25:15,720
Speaker 3: And anyway, how do you give masses to all the

464
00:25:15,720 --> 00:25:19,440
Speaker 3: fundamental particles without breaking this other symmetry. And he came

465
00:25:19,520 --> 00:25:22,119
Speaker 3: up with a mechanism, a mathematical mechanism. He said, you

466
00:25:22,160 --> 00:25:25,040
Speaker 3: know what, this whole theory is missing a piece and

467
00:25:25,480 --> 00:25:28,840
Speaker 3: clicks together only if you add this one more element.

468
00:25:28,880 --> 00:25:32,080
Speaker 3: And so this is a purely mathematical observation, saying like,

469
00:25:32,680 --> 00:25:34,960
Speaker 3: there's a mathematical structure here, and it seems like it's

470
00:25:35,000 --> 00:25:38,280
Speaker 3: missing something. Fifty years later, we go out and it's there.

471
00:25:38,520 --> 00:25:41,240
Speaker 3: The Higgs boson is there in the universe. It's real.

472
00:25:41,640 --> 00:25:42,520
Speaker 2: It's kind of spooky.

473
00:25:42,760 --> 00:25:46,760
Speaker 3: It's spooky, right, And there's all these great quotes from physicists,

474
00:25:47,040 --> 00:25:50,919
Speaker 3: you know, like Stephen Weinberg saying that physicists often discover

475
00:25:51,000 --> 00:25:54,320
Speaker 3: that mathematicians have been there before them, you know, and

476
00:25:54,359 --> 00:25:57,280
Speaker 3: it goes back deeper. Like Maxwell Maxwell was the same.

477
00:25:57,600 --> 00:26:00,760
Speaker 3: Maxwell was assembling the equations of electromagnetism them and he

478
00:26:00,840 --> 00:26:03,280
Speaker 3: noticed lots of beautiful symmetry, but he also noticed, Hm,

479
00:26:03,440 --> 00:26:06,640
Speaker 3: hold on a second, this would be more symmetrical if

480
00:26:06,680 --> 00:26:09,320
Speaker 3: we added one piece. But you can't just like add

481
00:26:09,359 --> 00:26:12,560
Speaker 3: something to the laws of physics because it's prettier. And

482
00:26:12,640 --> 00:26:15,560
Speaker 3: yet when he went out there to find if there

483
00:26:15,720 --> 00:26:17,840
Speaker 3: is an element of the universe that corresponds to this

484
00:26:17,840 --> 00:26:19,720
Speaker 3: missing piece, he found, Oh, yes, it is. It just

485
00:26:19,720 --> 00:26:22,879
Speaker 3: had been overlooked. So again the math guided him. And

486
00:26:22,920 --> 00:26:25,720
Speaker 3: to me, that's really powerfully suggestive to say, like, Wow,

487
00:26:25,760 --> 00:26:29,680
Speaker 3: the universe isn't just described by math. It runs on math,

488
00:26:29,720 --> 00:26:33,240
Speaker 3: like it is fundamentally mathematical. And I remember having this

489
00:26:33,359 --> 00:26:36,560
Speaker 3: moment where I personally came to believe that as an

490
00:26:36,640 --> 00:26:40,840
Speaker 3: undergrad learning like quantum mechanics and hearing about like bells

491
00:26:40,840 --> 00:26:43,840
Speaker 3: inequality and all these experiments, and I was like, Wow,

492
00:26:44,200 --> 00:26:47,639
Speaker 3: this is too accurate to be approximate, too accurate to

493
00:26:47,840 --> 00:26:50,760
Speaker 3: just be a description, right, this is the rules, this

494
00:26:50,800 --> 00:26:53,200
Speaker 3: is the source code of the universe. So I used

495
00:26:53,240 --> 00:26:56,520
Speaker 3: to deeply, deeply believe that. But you know, the more

496
00:26:56,560 --> 00:26:58,480
Speaker 3: you dig into the philosophy of math, the more you

497
00:26:58,520 --> 00:27:02,320
Speaker 3: realize this sits on on a bunch of assumptions, assumptions

498
00:27:02,320 --> 00:27:05,639
Speaker 3: which sound plausible, but when you dig into them, like

499
00:27:05,680 --> 00:27:09,200
Speaker 3: do we really have good arguments for them? And as

500
00:27:09,240 --> 00:27:12,000
Speaker 3: you say, some of them relate to like arithmetic. In

501
00:27:12,040 --> 00:27:14,800
Speaker 3: the last couple of hundreds of years, philosophers of math

502
00:27:14,840 --> 00:27:18,200
Speaker 3: have asked questions like, well, what are the basic foundations

503
00:27:18,280 --> 00:27:21,840
Speaker 3: of math? Like what are the starting rules the few

504
00:27:21,840 --> 00:27:23,880
Speaker 3: things you need to assume from which you can build

505
00:27:23,960 --> 00:27:28,120
Speaker 3: everything else? And the goal of that is not just like, hey,

506
00:27:28,200 --> 00:27:30,560
Speaker 3: let's be nerdy and figure out what the rules are,

507
00:27:30,560 --> 00:27:33,480
Speaker 3: but like, let's examine those assumptions and wonder like could

508
00:27:33,480 --> 00:27:35,800
Speaker 3: they have been something else? You know, the way we

509
00:27:35,920 --> 00:27:38,840
Speaker 3: might like see the fundamental equation of the universe and

510
00:27:38,880 --> 00:27:40,840
Speaker 3: ask like, is it this way? Could it have been

511
00:27:40,880 --> 00:27:44,080
Speaker 3: the other way? You learned something by seeing the fundamental

512
00:27:44,119 --> 00:27:47,280
Speaker 3: nature written down, And in the last couple hundred years

513
00:27:47,280 --> 00:27:50,119
Speaker 3: we've learned We've made a lot of progress, Like, wow,

514
00:27:50,240 --> 00:27:54,160
Speaker 3: most of mathematics is based on arithmetic, and arithmetic itself

515
00:27:54,240 --> 00:27:57,000
Speaker 3: is based on a few basic axioms. They're called p

516
00:27:57,160 --> 00:28:00,280
Speaker 3: and O's axioms, and those can be described in terms

517
00:28:00,280 --> 00:28:02,919
Speaker 3: of set theory, like you know this is inside that,

518
00:28:03,119 --> 00:28:06,320
Speaker 3: and a barber who shaves himselves can shave other barbers

519
00:28:06,359 --> 00:28:09,280
Speaker 3: or whatever. But at the core of it, there's a

520
00:28:09,359 --> 00:28:13,000
Speaker 3: question mark, like Godle's theorem tells us that we can't

521
00:28:13,040 --> 00:28:16,600
Speaker 3: describe everything in math using those fundamental axioms. And then

522
00:28:16,640 --> 00:28:18,719
Speaker 3: even if you have a bunch of fundamental axioms, there

523
00:28:18,720 --> 00:28:21,199
Speaker 3: are always going to be things that aren't captured by it.

524
00:28:22,119 --> 00:28:25,760
Speaker 3: You know, there are things in arithmetic that are true

525
00:28:26,280 --> 00:28:30,000
Speaker 3: that cannot be proven with our axioms, which tells you, like,

526
00:28:30,560 --> 00:28:34,639
Speaker 3: maybe we don't really fundamentally understand what's at the core

527
00:28:34,840 --> 00:28:35,879
Speaker 3: of mathematics.

528
00:28:36,480 --> 00:28:40,959
Speaker 2: Is it possible to do physics without numbers? You explore

529
00:28:40,960 --> 00:28:44,280
Speaker 2: at least one scholar who's attempted to, I think, put

530
00:28:44,320 --> 00:28:48,000
Speaker 2: together a version of Newton's laws of motion or gravitation

531
00:28:48,520 --> 00:28:51,200
Speaker 2: without using numbers. You make it sound like it's kind

532
00:28:51,200 --> 00:28:53,600
Speaker 2: of difficult and painful.

533
00:28:56,120 --> 00:28:59,200
Speaker 3: I love this book. It's not easy to read. It's

534
00:28:59,200 --> 00:29:01,600
Speaker 3: like not written for a popular audience. It's written for

535
00:29:01,720 --> 00:29:05,000
Speaker 3: like nerves of philosophy. So I'll be honest, it was

536
00:29:05,040 --> 00:29:06,880
Speaker 3: hard for me to get through it and to really

537
00:29:06,880 --> 00:29:09,040
Speaker 3: digest it. But it's a great book. It's called Science

538
00:29:09,080 --> 00:29:12,880
Speaker 3: Without Numbers. It's by heartree Field, and it's really an

539
00:29:12,920 --> 00:29:15,880
Speaker 3: effort to give an example of like do we need

540
00:29:15,960 --> 00:29:19,080
Speaker 3: mathematics or is it just really useful? And he puts

541
00:29:19,080 --> 00:29:23,520
Speaker 3: together an alternative theory of gravity. You know. He starts

542
00:29:23,520 --> 00:29:25,360
Speaker 3: with Newton's theory, which you can write in terms of

543
00:29:25,400 --> 00:29:28,920
Speaker 3: like a gravitational potential and a gravitational field, which is

544
00:29:29,000 --> 00:29:32,080
Speaker 3: very handy. And newton theory famously has an equation in

545
00:29:32,120 --> 00:29:34,640
Speaker 3: it and you can like calculate things with numbers, and

546
00:29:34,640 --> 00:29:37,040
Speaker 3: it's like, do we need that or is that just

547
00:29:37,120 --> 00:29:40,040
Speaker 3: really helpful? So he put together this theory of gravity

548
00:29:40,080 --> 00:29:43,000
Speaker 3: with no numbers. There is no gravitational field. He says,

549
00:29:43,120 --> 00:29:45,640
Speaker 3: you can't observe that directly anyway. All you see is

550
00:29:45,720 --> 00:29:49,280
Speaker 3: motion of particles. So maybe that's just like an intermediate

551
00:29:49,320 --> 00:29:52,480
Speaker 3: step that's useful to us. And then he's like, maybe

552
00:29:52,480 --> 00:29:54,640
Speaker 3: you don't need numbers at all. Maybe you don't need

553
00:29:54,680 --> 00:29:57,840
Speaker 3: to say the field has a value here, and you

554
00:29:57,880 --> 00:30:00,400
Speaker 3: know this has this the son has a mass of

555
00:30:00,440 --> 00:30:03,680
Speaker 3: this number. Maybe all you need are relationships. You know

556
00:30:03,760 --> 00:30:05,600
Speaker 3: this one has more mass than the other one. This

557
00:30:05,680 --> 00:30:08,320
Speaker 3: is a greater distance than that one. If he structure

558
00:30:08,360 --> 00:30:12,600
Speaker 3: in terms of relationships, he was able to recover the

559
00:30:13,360 --> 00:30:15,400
Speaker 3: not the equations of motion right because it's not like

560
00:30:15,440 --> 00:30:19,040
Speaker 3: he's not dealing with numbers, but a description of the

561
00:30:19,080 --> 00:30:24,200
Speaker 3: behavior gravitationally without using Newton's theory and without using any numbers.

562
00:30:24,880 --> 00:30:28,000
Speaker 3: So in the philosophy of mass, this approach is called nominalism.

563
00:30:28,480 --> 00:30:33,560
Speaker 3: Essentially says that numbers are something we made up, you know, one, two, four,

564
00:30:33,800 --> 00:30:36,400
Speaker 3: They don't exist anywhere in the world. Like where is

565
00:30:36,440 --> 00:30:40,440
Speaker 3: the number four? It's sort of hilarious philosophy question that

566
00:30:40,480 --> 00:30:42,800
Speaker 3: you could just brush off. It's like, well, it sounds

567
00:30:42,800 --> 00:30:45,520
Speaker 3: like you've been smoking too many banana peels. But you know,

568
00:30:45,600 --> 00:30:49,280
Speaker 3: if four exists outside of human knowledge and before us,

569
00:30:49,360 --> 00:30:53,120
Speaker 3: then like where is it? It's sort of a reasonable question, Like,

570
00:30:53,680 --> 00:30:55,640
Speaker 3: you know, if it's part of the universe, it should

571
00:30:55,680 --> 00:30:57,640
Speaker 3: have a location. Everything else that's part of the universe

572
00:30:57,640 --> 00:31:00,520
Speaker 3: has a location. So maybe it's just some thing we

573
00:31:00,680 --> 00:31:04,040
Speaker 3: constructed to help us think about stuff. And so it's

574
00:31:04,040 --> 00:31:06,840
Speaker 3: pretty hard to grow like a theory of physics without math,

575
00:31:06,880 --> 00:31:08,560
Speaker 3: And that's his point. His point is like look, math

576
00:31:08,640 --> 00:31:12,440
Speaker 3: is very useful, but that doesn't mean it's necessary the

577
00:31:12,480 --> 00:31:14,920
Speaker 3: way like, yes, having a car in Los Angeles is

578
00:31:15,000 --> 00:31:17,920
Speaker 3: very useful, but you could walk everywhere it would be

579
00:31:17,960 --> 00:31:21,600
Speaker 3: a huge pain. Right. It's obviously an advantage, but it

580
00:31:21,600 --> 00:31:24,560
Speaker 3: doesn't mean it's fundamental. And that opens up the door

581
00:31:24,600 --> 00:31:27,040
Speaker 3: to like, well, maybe aliens found some other way to think.

582
00:31:27,080 --> 00:31:31,080
Speaker 3: Maybe math reflects the way our minds work instead of

583
00:31:31,080 --> 00:31:34,040
Speaker 3: the way the universe works, and if alien minds work differently,

584
00:31:34,480 --> 00:31:37,000
Speaker 3: they might come up with something else we wouldn't call math.

585
00:31:37,640 --> 00:31:41,640
Speaker 3: Or if aliens evolved in a similar situation where they

586
00:31:41,680 --> 00:31:45,040
Speaker 3: have bodies that are easy to distinguish and so counting

587
00:31:45,440 --> 00:31:48,240
Speaker 3: makes sense, and they have like, you know, interesting economies

588
00:31:48,280 --> 00:31:51,000
Speaker 3: that are similar hours, they might have evolved the similar concepts.

589
00:31:51,080 --> 00:31:53,360
Speaker 3: So it comes down to essentially how much we have

590
00:31:53,440 --> 00:31:57,640
Speaker 3: in common with them evolutionarily and conceptually, whether or not

591
00:31:57,680 --> 00:32:01,920
Speaker 3: we think they might have math, but it's definitely not necessary.

592
00:32:01,960 --> 00:32:04,600
Speaker 3: And even here on Earth. I was surprised when I

593
00:32:04,640 --> 00:32:07,080
Speaker 3: was doing my research to learn that different cultures here

594
00:32:07,120 --> 00:32:10,760
Speaker 3: on Earth have different relationships with counting. You know, you

595
00:32:10,840 --> 00:32:12,360
Speaker 3: might look at a bunch of stuff on a desk

596
00:32:12,600 --> 00:32:14,120
Speaker 3: and I can ask you like, oh, how many things

597
00:32:14,160 --> 00:32:16,240
Speaker 3: are on the desk and you say, oh, there's four things.

598
00:32:16,960 --> 00:32:20,240
Speaker 3: But somebody who's Japanese, for example, they have different categories

599
00:32:20,240 --> 00:32:22,920
Speaker 3: of counting, and they would never group together things that

600
00:32:22,960 --> 00:32:25,520
Speaker 3: are like long and thin with things that are like

601
00:32:25,560 --> 00:32:27,840
Speaker 3: flat and short. So if you're like pencils and CDs

602
00:32:27,880 --> 00:32:30,400
Speaker 3: on a desk, they would say, oh, there's two pencils

603
00:32:30,440 --> 00:32:33,760
Speaker 3: and two CDs. You can't say that's four things because

604
00:32:33,760 --> 00:32:37,400
Speaker 3: they're different categories, right, And that's a hint where you

605
00:32:37,440 --> 00:32:39,680
Speaker 3: can dig in and say, like, well, when do we

606
00:32:39,720 --> 00:32:42,800
Speaker 3: group things together? Like why do I say this four things?

607
00:32:42,840 --> 00:32:44,960
Speaker 3: What is the category of a thing? Like why do

608
00:32:45,040 --> 00:32:46,960
Speaker 3: I say these things are similar enough that I can

609
00:32:47,000 --> 00:32:49,320
Speaker 3: call them a thing? And in the end, that's a

610
00:32:49,320 --> 00:32:51,680
Speaker 3: bit of an arbitrary distinction. Like if you look at

611
00:32:51,680 --> 00:32:53,840
Speaker 3: a bunch of apples on a table, I could say

612
00:32:53,840 --> 00:32:56,360
Speaker 3: there's ten apples, or I could say, well, there's this apple,

613
00:32:56,400 --> 00:32:58,320
Speaker 3: and there's that apple, and there's the other apple, and

614
00:32:58,640 --> 00:33:02,320
Speaker 3: they're all unique apple and so on what basis am

615
00:33:02,360 --> 00:33:05,280
Speaker 3: I saying they're all the same. That's culture, that's I'm

616
00:33:05,360 --> 00:33:09,520
Speaker 3: saying the differences are not important, and that's arbitrary and like,

617
00:33:09,680 --> 00:33:12,840
Speaker 3: I'm probably right there are about ten apples. Like I'm

618
00:33:12,880 --> 00:33:16,640
Speaker 3: not saying that every apple really is fundamentally different. But

619
00:33:16,720 --> 00:33:19,800
Speaker 3: when you discover that the lines you're drawing are arbitrary,

620
00:33:19,960 --> 00:33:22,320
Speaker 3: then that makes you wonder whether other people are drawing

621
00:33:22,400 --> 00:33:26,400
Speaker 3: different arbitrary lines. And again, this isn't like to say

622
00:33:26,760 --> 00:33:29,640
Speaker 3: math is useless or anything. It's just to point out

623
00:33:29,840 --> 00:33:32,200
Speaker 3: that there are cracks here, that there are assumptions we're

624
00:33:32,200 --> 00:33:35,240
Speaker 3: making that are human that might be made differently elsewhere.

625
00:33:35,760 --> 00:33:38,680
Speaker 2: Okay, you ask some other really interesting questions along these

626
00:33:38,680 --> 00:33:42,560
Speaker 2: lines about how our thinking versus alien thinking might influence

627
00:33:43,000 --> 00:33:45,640
Speaker 2: different ways that we could relate to the universe or

628
00:33:45,680 --> 00:33:49,080
Speaker 2: that science could arise. One is you talk about differences

629
00:33:49,120 --> 00:33:53,560
Speaker 2: in perception like native sensory capabilities, and how that could

630
00:33:53,920 --> 00:33:56,880
Speaker 2: probably determine what kinds of questions and answers make sense.

631
00:33:57,080 --> 00:33:58,480
Speaker 2: Maybe we can come back to that, because I want

632
00:33:58,520 --> 00:34:01,680
Speaker 2: to get to your question about your chapter on do

633
00:34:01,760 --> 00:34:05,120
Speaker 2: aliens argue about planets? I found this really interesting because

634
00:34:05,480 --> 00:34:08,799
Speaker 2: I don't think I'd ever considered it this way. But

635
00:34:08,880 --> 00:34:12,360
Speaker 2: you start here with a with a contact hypothetical about

636
00:34:12,400 --> 00:34:16,920
Speaker 2: the inhabitants of a subsurface ocean on Jupiter's moon Europa,

637
00:34:17,239 --> 00:34:21,680
Speaker 2: who see everything in terms of Eddy's kind of swirling

638
00:34:21,719 --> 00:34:26,759
Speaker 2: swarms of matter in motion, and that that's as fundamental

639
00:34:26,840 --> 00:34:29,600
Speaker 2: to their physical view of reality as the idea of

640
00:34:29,719 --> 00:34:33,400
Speaker 2: particles and discrete objects is to us. I thought that

641
00:34:33,520 --> 00:34:37,080
Speaker 2: was really interesting, the idea that we could meet with

642
00:34:37,120 --> 00:34:39,600
Speaker 2: another speci And of course from here you build up

643
00:34:39,600 --> 00:34:41,360
Speaker 2: the idea that we could meet with this other specie.

644
00:34:41,400 --> 00:34:45,040
Speaker 2: We could both have science and both be able and

645
00:34:45,160 --> 00:34:48,800
Speaker 2: willing to communicate with each other, but end up finding

646
00:34:48,880 --> 00:34:54,440
Speaker 2: each other's physical metaphors for describing reality uninteresting and not

647
00:34:54,719 --> 00:34:57,319
Speaker 2: very useful. I don't think I don't think i'd ever

648
00:34:57,680 --> 00:34:59,920
Speaker 2: that had never entered my mind. So could you elaborate?

649
00:35:00,640 --> 00:35:04,319
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, the goal here is like identify the

650
00:35:04,400 --> 00:35:07,600
Speaker 3: assumptions that underpin our science and wonder if they could

651
00:35:07,640 --> 00:35:10,840
Speaker 3: be different. And one of my goals in writing this

652
00:35:10,880 --> 00:35:14,680
Speaker 3: book was to bring to more popular awareness that there's

653
00:35:14,760 --> 00:35:17,800
Speaker 3: like a raging philosophical debate about some of these things

654
00:35:17,840 --> 00:35:20,440
Speaker 3: that a lot of people aren't even aware of, and

655
00:35:20,480 --> 00:35:23,960
Speaker 3: one of them is this principle of emergence. You know. Essentially,

656
00:35:24,000 --> 00:35:27,160
Speaker 3: it asked the question, why can you make chicken soup?

657
00:35:27,200 --> 00:35:31,000
Speaker 3: Without understanding quantum gravity. Like, we don't understand the fundamental

658
00:35:31,080 --> 00:35:33,279
Speaker 3: nature of the universe for sure, we don't, you know,

659
00:35:33,360 --> 00:35:35,960
Speaker 3: like we've zoomed down to electrons and quarks and whatever.

660
00:35:36,080 --> 00:35:38,320
Speaker 3: We know that's not the final story, and we don't

661
00:35:38,360 --> 00:35:40,719
Speaker 3: know how far below that is the final story. Is

662
00:35:40,760 --> 00:35:44,160
Speaker 3: there even a final story? And yet people have been

663
00:35:44,200 --> 00:35:47,520
Speaker 3: like calculating how to lob cannonballs over castle walls for

664
00:35:47,560 --> 00:35:50,080
Speaker 3: a long time. And people live in the world, and

665
00:35:50,680 --> 00:35:53,560
Speaker 3: you know, we have very fancy technology that describes the

666
00:35:53,600 --> 00:35:56,919
Speaker 3: behavior of transistors and all this sorts of stuff. Why

667
00:35:57,000 --> 00:36:01,080
Speaker 3: is it possible to understand the world world without understanding

668
00:36:01,120 --> 00:36:04,520
Speaker 3: the basic rules of it. There's this sort of magic

669
00:36:04,640 --> 00:36:08,239
Speaker 3: trick that all of our science relies on, and it's

670
00:36:08,280 --> 00:36:11,120
Speaker 3: called emergence, and it says that the universe seems to

671
00:36:11,120 --> 00:36:14,560
Speaker 3: operate at different levels, and you can understand the universe

672
00:36:14,560 --> 00:36:17,360
Speaker 3: at sort of our level without knowing the details of

673
00:36:17,400 --> 00:36:19,960
Speaker 3: what's going on inside. Right. We've been able to do

674
00:36:20,040 --> 00:36:24,799
Speaker 3: biology and chemistry well before we were even doing particle physics. Right,

675
00:36:24,840 --> 00:36:28,200
Speaker 3: So it's not like everybody was waiting, y Daniel, particle

676
00:36:28,239 --> 00:36:30,640
Speaker 3: physicists tell us what is the rules so that we

677
00:36:30,680 --> 00:36:33,719
Speaker 3: can then extrapolate upwards to biology, like you could just

678
00:36:33,719 --> 00:36:35,960
Speaker 3: go ahead and do biology, you can go ahead and

679
00:36:36,080 --> 00:36:40,040
Speaker 3: do chemistry, you can do lots of classical physics. But

680
00:36:40,080 --> 00:36:43,359
Speaker 3: why does that happen? Why is that even possible? You know,

681
00:36:43,480 --> 00:36:45,400
Speaker 3: if I told you I'm going to make up a

682
00:36:45,440 --> 00:36:48,160
Speaker 3: bunch of random, arbitrary rules for the way the universe

683
00:36:48,160 --> 00:36:50,759
Speaker 3: works at its fundamental level, you might think, okay, well,

684
00:36:50,760 --> 00:36:54,600
Speaker 3: what are the consequences then for the macroscopic scale, you know,

685
00:36:54,640 --> 00:36:56,839
Speaker 3: And it turns out it's weird that you don't have

686
00:36:56,920 --> 00:37:00,880
Speaker 3: to know the microscopic to understand the macroscopic. And that's

687
00:37:00,920 --> 00:37:03,239
Speaker 3: the thing that makes me wonder if we don't know

688
00:37:03,560 --> 00:37:06,719
Speaker 3: why that works. And this is a deep question in philosophy,

689
00:37:06,800 --> 00:37:13,399
Speaker 3: why does simplicity emerge from complexity and chaos? Then how

690
00:37:13,440 --> 00:37:16,160
Speaker 3: do we know we're not imposing it on the universe?

691
00:37:16,160 --> 00:37:18,439
Speaker 3: How do we know there's not a cultural bias where

692
00:37:18,440 --> 00:37:21,520
Speaker 3: we're like, well, there's a seeding mass of chaos out

693
00:37:21,520 --> 00:37:23,640
Speaker 3: there in the universe, and we're selecting the things that

694
00:37:23,680 --> 00:37:26,719
Speaker 3: are interesting to us because they're relevant to us and

695
00:37:26,760 --> 00:37:28,799
Speaker 3: they come out of the way we live, and we're

696
00:37:28,800 --> 00:37:32,719
Speaker 3: expressing the universe in terms of those things. And so

697
00:37:33,800 --> 00:37:36,640
Speaker 3: I chose this question of planets because talking to a

698
00:37:36,680 --> 00:37:38,680
Speaker 3: mathematician friend of mine early on in his book, he

699
00:37:38,719 --> 00:37:40,719
Speaker 3: was like, yeah, well, but I mean, aliens are going

700
00:37:40,800 --> 00:37:42,960
Speaker 3: to agree with us, but like there are planets and

701
00:37:43,000 --> 00:37:46,239
Speaker 3: stars and galaxies and we have some scientific cultural touch points.

702
00:37:46,239 --> 00:37:48,080
Speaker 3: And I was like, well, I don't know, maybe what

703
00:37:48,200 --> 00:37:50,759
Speaker 3: if they didn't evolve on a planet so they don't

704
00:37:50,800 --> 00:37:55,239
Speaker 3: see like rocks through space as fundamental. I mean, one

705
00:37:55,239 --> 00:37:58,520
Speaker 3: way to understand this is like, think about how we

706
00:37:58,560 --> 00:38:02,719
Speaker 3: describe the Solar System. Is it to scale? It never is.

707
00:38:03,280 --> 00:38:05,799
Speaker 3: Whenever you see a description of the Solar System, it

708
00:38:05,840 --> 00:38:09,200
Speaker 3: takes the planets and it zooms them way out of proportion.

709
00:38:09,640 --> 00:38:11,600
Speaker 3: Somebody looking at that would be like, whoa dude, you

710
00:38:11,760 --> 00:38:14,640
Speaker 3: kind of biased towards planets here, Like, really, planets are

711
00:38:14,760 --> 00:38:18,840
Speaker 3: irrelevant dust compared to the Sun. So if you're an

712
00:38:18,880 --> 00:38:22,239
Speaker 3: alien species that evolves like in a solar atmosphere, you're

713
00:38:22,280 --> 00:38:24,480
Speaker 3: going to think it's awfully weird that we think about

714
00:38:24,480 --> 00:38:26,640
Speaker 3: solar systems the way that we do, where planets are

715
00:38:26,680 --> 00:38:29,640
Speaker 3: front and center. And as I make the argument in

716
00:38:29,680 --> 00:38:31,960
Speaker 3: the book, we don't even have a good definition of

717
00:38:32,000 --> 00:38:33,799
Speaker 3: what a planet is. I mean, we've been arguing about

718
00:38:33,840 --> 00:38:37,480
Speaker 3: it for decades and the definition we have is pretty absurd.

719
00:38:37,560 --> 00:38:41,000
Speaker 3: And it's the reason, like for all this kerfuffle about Pluto,

720
00:38:41,560 --> 00:38:44,720
Speaker 3: it's because we wanted to protect this category. We wanted

721
00:38:44,760 --> 00:38:48,799
Speaker 3: to have something special that made us feel important. And

722
00:38:48,960 --> 00:38:51,120
Speaker 3: anytime we've done that in the history of science, you know,

723
00:38:51,200 --> 00:38:52,880
Speaker 3: like the Earth, this is the center of the universe,

724
00:38:52,880 --> 00:38:55,000
Speaker 3: the Earth is the center of the Solar System. It's

725
00:38:55,160 --> 00:38:59,439
Speaker 3: always let us down the wrong path. And so it's

726
00:38:59,440 --> 00:39:03,080
Speaker 3: hard to imagine aliens who don't understand planets and don't

727
00:39:03,080 --> 00:39:05,800
Speaker 3: think about the universe in terms of rocks orbiting stars.

728
00:39:06,160 --> 00:39:09,400
Speaker 3: But if they evolve in subsurface oceans, maybe they just

729
00:39:09,400 --> 00:39:13,280
Speaker 3: think about, you know, little chaotic vortices and they build

730
00:39:13,360 --> 00:39:16,080
Speaker 3: up their explanation in the universe from that. So that's

731
00:39:16,120 --> 00:39:17,600
Speaker 3: what this chapter is about. And I had a lot

732
00:39:17,600 --> 00:39:20,920
Speaker 3: of fun talking to philosophers about emergence, and it realized

733
00:39:21,000 --> 00:39:23,359
Speaker 3: that I had a lot of assumptions about the way

734
00:39:23,400 --> 00:39:27,040
Speaker 3: emergence works. Like, for example, I assumed that the universe

735
00:39:27,080 --> 00:39:31,879
Speaker 3: has a fundamental level, that there is some firmament where

736
00:39:31,880 --> 00:39:34,960
Speaker 3: the rules are set and everything emerges from that, and

737
00:39:35,239 --> 00:39:37,960
Speaker 3: maybe we don't know exactly how, and it's complicated the

738
00:39:38,000 --> 00:39:40,359
Speaker 3: way that like hurricanes are complicated, but we think they

739
00:39:40,360 --> 00:39:43,839
Speaker 3: follow rules, but that's not necessarily true. Like what if

740
00:39:43,840 --> 00:39:46,520
Speaker 3: there is no firmament. What if it's just like layers

741
00:39:46,560 --> 00:39:50,600
Speaker 3: of emergence all the way down, or what if you know,

742
00:39:50,640 --> 00:39:54,560
Speaker 3: they don't follow from below, Maybe things don't bubble upwards.

743
00:39:54,880 --> 00:39:57,440
Speaker 3: Maybe every layer has its own set of laws that

744
00:39:57,480 --> 00:40:01,359
Speaker 3: are somehow independent. There's a lot of basic philosophical assumptions

745
00:40:01,719 --> 00:40:03,600
Speaker 3: you make when you take a sort of particle physics

746
00:40:03,640 --> 00:40:07,520
Speaker 3: point of view there.

747
00:40:14,640 --> 00:40:16,920
Speaker 2: That gets into your chapter also about the idea that

748
00:40:17,000 --> 00:40:20,560
Speaker 2: maybe there are no underlying laws of physics, but also

749
00:40:20,760 --> 00:40:23,320
Speaker 2: just at the base level of you know, the objects

750
00:40:23,320 --> 00:40:26,759
Speaker 2: we deal with when we're talking about planets and particles.

751
00:40:27,239 --> 00:40:29,560
Speaker 2: There was a great example in this chapter where you're

752
00:40:29,600 --> 00:40:32,799
Speaker 2: trying to illuminate the different zoom settings. I think a

753
00:40:32,840 --> 00:40:36,279
Speaker 2: lot of people will be familiar with the idea that, yeah,

754
00:40:36,440 --> 00:40:39,279
Speaker 2: chemistry maybe is an approximation and you can get more

755
00:40:39,280 --> 00:40:42,279
Speaker 2: exact if you go down into particle physics, and and

756
00:40:42,320 --> 00:40:44,879
Speaker 2: of course you know hire biology is more of an approximation.

757
00:40:45,040 --> 00:40:46,719
Speaker 2: It's based on emergence. But I think a lot of

758
00:40:46,760 --> 00:40:49,440
Speaker 2: people would have that in their head, but think, well,

759
00:40:49,440 --> 00:40:52,680
Speaker 2: when you get down to you know, particles, that's the

760
00:40:52,719 --> 00:40:55,360
Speaker 2: base level. But I love the example you use in

761
00:40:55,400 --> 00:40:59,040
Speaker 2: the book of the charge of the electron and how actually,

762
00:40:59,280 --> 00:41:02,400
Speaker 2: while we have good approximation for how that works, that

763
00:41:02,520 --> 00:41:06,680
Speaker 2: still relies on zoom settings. Could you explain that example.

764
00:41:07,400 --> 00:41:09,359
Speaker 3: Yeah, I wanted to dig into this because I think

765
00:41:09,360 --> 00:41:10,839
Speaker 3: a lot of people think about it the way you

766
00:41:10,880 --> 00:41:13,879
Speaker 3: just described that. They imagine that eventually you can get

767
00:41:13,920 --> 00:41:16,080
Speaker 3: down to the fundamental truth, right And like number one,

768
00:41:16,120 --> 00:41:18,440
Speaker 3: we don't know if there is and the zoomiest bit

769
00:41:18,480 --> 00:41:20,600
Speaker 3: that we have so far is still kind of a mess.

770
00:41:21,080 --> 00:41:24,320
Speaker 3: Like I make fun of astronomers having a silly definition

771
00:41:24,440 --> 00:41:27,399
Speaker 3: of planet, but like definition of a particle is much

772
00:41:27,440 --> 00:41:30,680
Speaker 3: more of a mess philosophically. You get ten particle theorists

773
00:41:30,680 --> 00:41:32,320
Speaker 3: in a room and you ask them what is a particle?

774
00:41:32,360 --> 00:41:35,759
Speaker 3: You're gonna get ten answers, Like it's crazy. Like this

775
00:41:35,920 --> 00:41:40,239
Speaker 3: concept is historical, it's intuitive for us. It comes out

776
00:41:40,239 --> 00:41:42,560
Speaker 3: of our need to describe the universe in terms of

777
00:41:42,640 --> 00:41:46,040
Speaker 3: like little bits of stuff, and in many ways I

778
00:41:46,040 --> 00:41:48,560
Speaker 3: think it's holding us back. You know, we have a

779
00:41:48,600 --> 00:41:51,520
Speaker 3: glimpse now in quantum field theory that things work differently,

780
00:41:51,560 --> 00:41:54,920
Speaker 3: but we're still sort of like clinging to this idea anyway.

781
00:41:54,960 --> 00:41:58,560
Speaker 3: The current idea of a particle is hard to describe

782
00:41:58,680 --> 00:42:02,200
Speaker 3: because particles are by themselves. Like you think of an

783
00:42:02,200 --> 00:42:05,800
Speaker 3: electron as a tiny dot with a negative charge on it. Cool,

784
00:42:05,840 --> 00:42:09,239
Speaker 3: little ball, Yeah, people think a little ball, right, And

785
00:42:09,320 --> 00:42:12,839
Speaker 3: there it is. There's your intuition, your classical intuition. I

786
00:42:12,920 --> 00:42:15,240
Speaker 3: live in the universe with rocks and little bits of stuff,

787
00:42:15,239 --> 00:42:17,319
Speaker 3: and so everything is made out of little bits of stuff, right.

788
00:42:17,680 --> 00:42:20,000
Speaker 3: It's the way you might laugh at the ancient Greeks,

789
00:42:20,000 --> 00:42:23,440
Speaker 3: and we're still doing it. But you think of the electron,

790
00:42:23,480 --> 00:42:25,359
Speaker 3: even if you like think, well, it's not a ball

791
00:42:25,400 --> 00:42:27,360
Speaker 3: of stuff, it's a point, right, and it's got a

792
00:42:27,400 --> 00:42:29,719
Speaker 3: negative sign on it. And where does that negative sign

793
00:42:29,760 --> 00:42:32,239
Speaker 3: come from? Well, we measure it in experiments, right. We

794
00:42:32,360 --> 00:42:34,880
Speaker 3: know the charge of the electron. We have the famous

795
00:42:34,880 --> 00:42:38,040
Speaker 3: oil drop experiment that told us the mass to charge ratio,

796
00:42:38,040 --> 00:42:41,480
Speaker 3: et cetera. But is that the charge of the electron itself?

797
00:42:41,680 --> 00:42:45,000
Speaker 3: Because the electron, because it has a charge, is always

798
00:42:45,040 --> 00:42:48,960
Speaker 3: interacting with the electromagnetic field. It makes a field and

799
00:42:49,040 --> 00:42:52,400
Speaker 3: as it moves that field ripples, and so the right

800
00:42:52,440 --> 00:42:54,640
Speaker 3: way to describe an electron either is in terms of

801
00:42:54,680 --> 00:42:57,360
Speaker 3: a field around it, or equivalently as a cloud of

802
00:42:57,440 --> 00:43:01,640
Speaker 3: virtual photons. Right, Photons are ripples in the electromagnetic field,

803
00:43:01,719 --> 00:43:04,080
Speaker 3: and so from the particle point of view, you have

804
00:43:04,200 --> 00:43:07,080
Speaker 3: the electron. It's surrounded by this cloud of virtual photons,

805
00:43:07,520 --> 00:43:10,840
Speaker 3: and those virtual photons change the charge that you measure.

806
00:43:11,320 --> 00:43:13,520
Speaker 3: So when you're measuring the charge of the electron, you're

807
00:43:13,520 --> 00:43:17,200
Speaker 3: not measuring the charge of the pure bear electron. You're

808
00:43:17,239 --> 00:43:20,120
Speaker 3: measuring the charge of the electron plus this cloud of photons.

809
00:43:20,440 --> 00:43:24,440
Speaker 3: Because photons can fluctuate into like electrons and positrons, you

810
00:43:24,480 --> 00:43:27,759
Speaker 3: have this cloud of charged particles, and say electrons charge

811
00:43:27,920 --> 00:43:31,799
Speaker 3: polarizes that cloud, and depending on how far into that

812
00:43:31,840 --> 00:43:34,680
Speaker 3: cloud you go, you get a different answer for what

813
00:43:34,840 --> 00:43:37,080
Speaker 3: is the charge that we measure. So really far away

814
00:43:37,120 --> 00:43:39,360
Speaker 3: from the cloud you get the charge that we know

815
00:43:39,440 --> 00:43:42,800
Speaker 3: in loud that Ben Franklin discovered and that we measured

816
00:43:42,800 --> 00:43:45,040
Speaker 3: one hundred years ago. But if you start to probe

817
00:43:45,040 --> 00:43:47,719
Speaker 3: into that cloud, then you're not seeing as much of

818
00:43:47,760 --> 00:43:51,280
Speaker 3: those photons. You're getting through it closer to the bare electron,

819
00:43:51,320 --> 00:43:54,440
Speaker 3: closer to the real truth of the electrons charge, and

820
00:43:54,480 --> 00:43:57,239
Speaker 3: you get a more negative number. And the deeper you

821
00:43:57,280 --> 00:44:00,759
Speaker 3: probe in towards that cloud, the more or you're not

822
00:44:00,800 --> 00:44:04,240
Speaker 3: being affected by those particles, the more negative that number gets.

823
00:44:04,520 --> 00:44:07,160
Speaker 3: And if you extrapolate, what would it be like if

824
00:44:07,160 --> 00:44:08,640
Speaker 3: you went all the way through the clouds, you went

825
00:44:08,680 --> 00:44:10,680
Speaker 3: all the way to the electron. What number would you

826
00:44:10,719 --> 00:44:13,400
Speaker 3: measure for the charge of the electron? The answer is

827
00:44:13,840 --> 00:44:19,880
Speaker 3: negative infinity? Like what? This is another example in physics

828
00:44:19,880 --> 00:44:22,160
Speaker 3: where you get a nonsense answer that tells you that,

829
00:44:22,320 --> 00:44:27,000
Speaker 3: like your theory has been pushed beyond its region of applicability. Right,

830
00:44:27,040 --> 00:44:30,120
Speaker 3: it doesn't make sense. We're not saying the electron really

831
00:44:30,160 --> 00:44:34,000
Speaker 3: does have a negative charge. We're saying the concept of

832
00:44:34,040 --> 00:44:37,080
Speaker 3: the electron on its own with the charge that is

833
00:44:37,160 --> 00:44:40,520
Speaker 3: not an appropriate way to think about what's happening. Really,

834
00:44:40,600 --> 00:44:44,520
Speaker 3: electrons are always tied together with photons. We're making this

835
00:44:44,640 --> 00:44:48,160
Speaker 3: arbitrary dotted line between the electrons and the photons because

836
00:44:48,200 --> 00:44:50,680
Speaker 3: we like to think of it that way, But fundamentally,

837
00:44:50,760 --> 00:44:53,600
Speaker 3: these two are so deeply interwoven that it doesn't make

838
00:44:53,640 --> 00:44:56,239
Speaker 3: sense to imagine the charge of the electron by itself.

839
00:44:56,719 --> 00:44:59,680
Speaker 3: So even this concept of a particle, like the fundamental

840
00:44:59,719 --> 00:45:01,600
Speaker 3: base this of all of our particle physics, and we

841
00:45:01,640 --> 00:45:04,520
Speaker 3: think the universe and even if the electron isn't, we

842
00:45:04,520 --> 00:45:07,440
Speaker 3: think that our particles within it. Right, this basic unit

843
00:45:07,800 --> 00:45:12,440
Speaker 3: of our imagination is something that's not really an appropriate

844
00:45:12,440 --> 00:45:17,000
Speaker 3: description of the universe. And so that to me smells

845
00:45:17,080 --> 00:45:21,240
Speaker 3: of humanity, of cultural choices, of being linked to our intuition,

846
00:45:21,520 --> 00:45:24,560
Speaker 3: the preference, the way that we like to hear the answers,

847
00:45:24,600 --> 00:45:28,080
Speaker 3: and so the language that we express ourselves in. And

848
00:45:28,239 --> 00:45:32,880
Speaker 3: I wonder if aliens argue about particles and argue about planets,

849
00:45:33,120 --> 00:45:36,520
Speaker 3: and it would be amazing. It'd be amazing if they didn't,

850
00:45:36,719 --> 00:45:40,319
Speaker 3: if they came with a completely different way of expressing

851
00:45:40,360 --> 00:45:43,799
Speaker 3: and explaining the universe, that would be mind blowing. That's

852
00:45:43,880 --> 00:45:44,720
Speaker 3: my real fantasy.

853
00:45:45,000 --> 00:45:47,080
Speaker 2: Well, that actually does tie into a later chapter, the

854
00:45:47,120 --> 00:45:52,200
Speaker 2: one where you're talking about alternative alien science. Could there

855
00:45:52,320 --> 00:45:58,080
Speaker 2: be completely different theories of everything, complete theories of physics

856
00:45:58,600 --> 00:46:03,640
Speaker 2: that both correctly predict the behavior of all matter, energy,

857
00:46:03,680 --> 00:46:07,279
Speaker 2: and space time, and yet they're different theories? Is that

858
00:46:07,320 --> 00:46:10,960
Speaker 2: actually possible? Are two different theories that always make the

859
00:46:11,040 --> 00:46:13,680
Speaker 2: exact same predictions actually equivalent?

860
00:46:14,239 --> 00:46:16,600
Speaker 3: Yeah, so this is a great example, like this is

861
00:46:16,640 --> 00:46:20,640
Speaker 3: a question philosophers have been debating for decades and decades

862
00:46:21,040 --> 00:46:24,919
Speaker 3: that's basically unknown in physics. Like I think most physicists

863
00:46:24,960 --> 00:46:28,120
Speaker 3: and most people out there imagine if you find a

864
00:46:28,200 --> 00:46:32,279
Speaker 3: theory that works and is simple and it's basic, like

865
00:46:32,400 --> 00:46:34,359
Speaker 3: say string theory, figures it out and they have one

866
00:46:34,400 --> 00:46:37,320
Speaker 3: equation and it describes everything and it predicts every experiment

867
00:46:37,360 --> 00:46:39,600
Speaker 3: and it all works, then people are like, okay, well

868
00:46:39,640 --> 00:46:43,600
Speaker 3: you're done right, Like that's it. But there's an assumption

869
00:46:43,719 --> 00:46:47,560
Speaker 3: there that there's a unique description, that there's only one description,

870
00:46:47,719 --> 00:46:51,000
Speaker 3: one way to answer this question, And it actually makes

871
00:46:51,000 --> 00:46:53,480
Speaker 3: a lot more sense to imagine that there might be

872
00:46:53,560 --> 00:46:57,560
Speaker 3: multiple descriptions. I mean, like, consider any time you have data,

873
00:46:58,000 --> 00:47:01,960
Speaker 3: you measure something, you have data points, and then you

874
00:47:02,040 --> 00:47:04,319
Speaker 3: try to describe it, describe it by like drawing a

875
00:47:04,360 --> 00:47:06,239
Speaker 3: line through it. Maybe it's a straight line, maybe it's

876
00:47:06,239 --> 00:47:08,760
Speaker 3: a wiggly line. Maybe you have some model you're fitting

877
00:47:08,800 --> 00:47:12,440
Speaker 3: to your data. That model is describing things between your

878
00:47:12,520 --> 00:47:15,440
Speaker 3: data points that you have not observed. And even if

879
00:47:15,440 --> 00:47:17,640
Speaker 3: you take infinite amounts of data, there will always be

880
00:47:17,760 --> 00:47:20,520
Speaker 3: multiple models that fit the data. So it actually kind

881
00:47:20,560 --> 00:47:23,600
Speaker 3: of makes sense to imagine you could have multiple ways

882
00:47:23,600 --> 00:47:26,759
Speaker 3: to describe the same universe, and I think this conflicts

883
00:47:26,760 --> 00:47:29,600
Speaker 3: with your natural intuition. They're like, yeah, but there's a

884
00:47:29,640 --> 00:47:33,520
Speaker 3: true answer. You know, the universe runs some way and

885
00:47:33,560 --> 00:47:36,200
Speaker 3: we just have to figure it out. And maybe we're right,

886
00:47:36,280 --> 00:47:38,360
Speaker 3: or maybe the aliens are right, and maybe our theory

887
00:47:38,400 --> 00:47:40,960
Speaker 3: of quantum fields is wrong and maybe their theory of

888
00:47:41,120 --> 00:47:44,720
Speaker 3: quantum fields is right or whatever. But there is a truth.

889
00:47:45,000 --> 00:47:49,120
Speaker 3: And that's a philosophical assumption saying that there's a single

890
00:47:49,160 --> 00:47:52,000
Speaker 3: objective truth that we could discover and it's unique. How

891
00:47:52,000 --> 00:47:56,120
Speaker 3: do you know you don't know. That's exactly the kind

892
00:47:56,120 --> 00:47:59,080
Speaker 3: of philosophical assumption I want to sort of reveal in

893
00:47:59,120 --> 00:48:01,279
Speaker 3: this book, saying that we don't. I'm not saying that

894
00:48:01,360 --> 00:48:04,480
Speaker 3: there isn't, but I'm saying that we can't be sure.

895
00:48:05,000 --> 00:48:07,920
Speaker 3: And you know, there's lots of arguments in philosophy that

896
00:48:08,080 --> 00:48:10,799
Speaker 3: say that there very well could be, and there's lots

897
00:48:10,840 --> 00:48:14,799
Speaker 3: of great historical examples. You know, the history of our

898
00:48:14,920 --> 00:48:19,600
Speaker 3: physics is the history of overthrowing one way of thinking

899
00:48:19,600 --> 00:48:22,960
Speaker 3: about the universe for another one. You know, when Einstein

900
00:48:23,520 --> 00:48:27,200
Speaker 3: upgraded on understanding of gravity, didn't just give us better

901
00:48:27,200 --> 00:48:31,120
Speaker 3: equations that were more accurate. He completely revised the story

902
00:48:31,320 --> 00:48:34,799
Speaker 3: of what's happening. You know, it's not masses pulling on

903
00:48:34,840 --> 00:48:37,920
Speaker 3: each other. It's space itself is bending and curving, and

904
00:48:37,960 --> 00:48:41,080
Speaker 3: gravity is not even a force. So there is history

905
00:48:41,120 --> 00:48:46,000
Speaker 3: of overthrowing our ideas, which suggests that there are other

906
00:48:46,080 --> 00:48:49,520
Speaker 3: ideas out there which could better or at least equivalently

907
00:48:49,960 --> 00:48:52,440
Speaker 3: describe the universe that we see, that we could conceive

908
00:48:52,440 --> 00:48:55,000
Speaker 3: of right now. If you are a super genius, you

909
00:48:55,000 --> 00:48:57,759
Speaker 3: could sit down and come up with another way to

910
00:48:58,040 --> 00:49:02,880
Speaker 3: describe gravity or quantity, fields or whatever that's equivalent or superior.

911
00:49:03,520 --> 00:49:09,239
Speaker 3: And so it's certainly possible to have multiple theories. And

912
00:49:09,360 --> 00:49:11,880
Speaker 3: so in the in the literature, they argue about this,

913
00:49:11,960 --> 00:49:14,560
Speaker 3: and there's a whole group of people like this is

914
00:49:14,640 --> 00:49:17,960
Speaker 3: Guy Norton who says that any alternative theory is quote,

915
00:49:18,040 --> 00:49:20,920
Speaker 3: merely the same theory dressed in different clothes. Right that

916
00:49:21,200 --> 00:49:24,160
Speaker 3: as you say, look, okay, maybe you have fields and

917
00:49:24,200 --> 00:49:27,680
Speaker 3: we have shmields, but they must be equivalent because if

918
00:49:27,680 --> 00:49:31,040
Speaker 3: they're doing the same thing, right, they're making the same predictions,

919
00:49:31,360 --> 00:49:34,440
Speaker 3: how can they really be different? And you know, we

920
00:49:34,880 --> 00:49:37,880
Speaker 3: don't know the answer to that. Because nobody has an

921
00:49:37,920 --> 00:49:41,800
Speaker 3: alternative like this is theoretical. Philosophers say it should be possible,

922
00:49:42,080 --> 00:49:44,840
Speaker 3: and other philosophers say, like, all right, show us, you

923
00:49:44,880 --> 00:49:48,040
Speaker 3: know what are you talking about? Where is this alternative? Right?

924
00:49:49,680 --> 00:49:51,600
Speaker 3: And we don't have that. So all we can do

925
00:49:51,719 --> 00:49:54,239
Speaker 3: is look at our history, and we have some fascinating

926
00:49:54,320 --> 00:49:59,640
Speaker 3: examples there, like you know, Newtonian mechanics was supplanted by

927
00:49:59,760 --> 00:50:02,800
Speaker 3: the Rongen mechanics and Hamiltonian mechanics, which is a different

928
00:50:02,800 --> 00:50:05,680
Speaker 3: way to think about like how things move. If you

929
00:50:05,760 --> 00:50:08,120
Speaker 3: want to calculate, you know, how does the ball move

930
00:50:08,160 --> 00:50:10,799
Speaker 3: with the parabola, you can use Newtonian mechanics and we

931
00:50:10,840 --> 00:50:13,440
Speaker 3: do that. You know, F equals MA and that works.

932
00:50:13,800 --> 00:50:15,920
Speaker 3: But as soon as it gets complicated, you have your

933
00:50:15,920 --> 00:50:17,719
Speaker 3: ball and a string, and the string is being held

934
00:50:17,719 --> 00:50:19,680
Speaker 3: by a squirrel and the squirrels on a roller coaster,

935
00:50:20,160 --> 00:50:22,440
Speaker 3: it's way too hard to use Newton's laws, like it

936
00:50:22,600 --> 00:50:26,720
Speaker 3: just becomes unsolvable. So these clever guys, Lagrange and Hamilton

937
00:50:26,840 --> 00:50:31,040
Speaker 3: came up with more effective mechanics that rely essentially on

938
00:50:31,320 --> 00:50:34,480
Speaker 3: energy as the fundamental principle, and you can derive Newton's

939
00:50:34,560 --> 00:50:37,880
Speaker 3: laws from them, and Lagrange and mechanics and Hamiltonia mechanics

940
00:50:37,920 --> 00:50:40,600
Speaker 3: are very similar, but they're all so different, and you

941
00:50:40,640 --> 00:50:43,759
Speaker 3: can use both of them to describe these things. And

942
00:50:44,360 --> 00:50:46,120
Speaker 3: for like more than one hundred years, people have been

943
00:50:46,200 --> 00:50:50,279
Speaker 3: arguing about are these two theories just the same dressed

944
00:50:50,280 --> 00:50:54,320
Speaker 3: in different clothes or are they fundamentally different? And last

945
00:50:54,520 --> 00:50:57,480
Speaker 3: ten years or twenty years or so, they've been digging into, like, well,

946
00:50:57,480 --> 00:50:59,520
Speaker 3: what does it mean to be different? You know, this

947
00:50:59,600 --> 00:51:02,480
Speaker 3: is the way philosophy makes progress. They're like, well, what

948
00:51:02,600 --> 00:51:04,920
Speaker 3: is the word? Meaning of the word is mean anyway?

949
00:51:05,239 --> 00:51:08,360
Speaker 3: So it gets pretty nerdy and abstract. But fundamentally, we

950
00:51:08,400 --> 00:51:10,960
Speaker 3: don't know. We don't know if it's possible to have

951
00:51:11,040 --> 00:51:16,200
Speaker 3: multiple theories that describe the universe equivalently and are fundamentally

952
00:51:16,239 --> 00:51:20,800
Speaker 3: categorically different that they tell different conceptual stories, or if

953
00:51:21,000 --> 00:51:23,719
Speaker 3: both being effective means that they fundamentally have to be

954
00:51:23,800 --> 00:51:26,440
Speaker 3: telling the same story. We just don't know, And we

955
00:51:26,480 --> 00:51:30,040
Speaker 3: have examples on the other side, you know, like quantum mechanics.

956
00:51:30,360 --> 00:51:33,440
Speaker 3: We had matrix equations and we had wave equations. You know,

957
00:51:33,480 --> 00:51:37,319
Speaker 3: Schrodinger and Heisenberg and von Neumann showed okay, guys, these

958
00:51:37,320 --> 00:51:39,600
Speaker 3: are actually the same thing. You know, just you have

959
00:51:39,640 --> 00:51:42,280
Speaker 3: different operators and different kinds of math, and they seem

960
00:51:42,360 --> 00:51:45,440
Speaker 3: pretty different, but actually they are the same, which is

961
00:51:45,480 --> 00:51:48,640
Speaker 3: kind of hilarious because Schortinger and Heisenberg famously sort of

962
00:51:48,680 --> 00:51:52,680
Speaker 3: hated each other and really didn't like the other's approached, Like, ough,

963
00:51:52,800 --> 00:51:57,960
Speaker 3: I find it gross, but yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's some

964
00:51:58,040 --> 00:52:01,120
Speaker 3: German dissing in the in the academic literature which is

965
00:52:01,120 --> 00:52:03,719
Speaker 3: pretty fun to read. But they are fundamentally the same.

966
00:52:03,760 --> 00:52:06,360
Speaker 3: So you can show that's not two theories, right, that

967
00:52:06,480 --> 00:52:09,759
Speaker 3: is just one theory expressed in different clothing. So that

968
00:52:09,800 --> 00:52:12,279
Speaker 3: would be fascinating. Right when the aliens show up with

969
00:52:12,360 --> 00:52:15,160
Speaker 3: their theory, it might be very different and we might

970
00:52:15,200 --> 00:52:17,480
Speaker 3: be able to show that it's essentially the same, or

971
00:52:17,520 --> 00:52:20,840
Speaker 3: we might discover, wow, this is a very different story

972
00:52:20,840 --> 00:52:23,640
Speaker 3: about what's happening in the universe. It really is a

973
00:52:23,680 --> 00:52:27,880
Speaker 3: different way to explain things that can't be mapped to ours.

974
00:52:28,160 --> 00:52:30,480
Speaker 3: And what would that mean? You know, what would that

975
00:52:30,520 --> 00:52:36,240
Speaker 3: mean if the universe has multiple correct descriptions, it means

976
00:52:36,239 --> 00:52:39,600
Speaker 3: something about the nature of truth, right, but what is

977
00:52:39,640 --> 00:52:43,080
Speaker 3: really happening? If there is anything that you can say

978
00:52:43,239 --> 00:53:02,280
Speaker 3: is really happening.

979
00:52:55,600 --> 00:52:59,319
Speaker 2: So I think one reason people are tempted to think

980
00:52:59,320 --> 00:53:02,480
Speaker 2: that aliens would have science and it would be similar

981
00:53:02,520 --> 00:53:05,239
Speaker 2: to us, similar to our science, is because when we,

982
00:53:05,920 --> 00:53:08,120
Speaker 2: at least I have this experience, I think a lot

983
00:53:08,120 --> 00:53:12,960
Speaker 2: of people do. When you look back on scientific history,

984
00:53:13,040 --> 00:53:17,440
Speaker 2: you somehow get this feeling that it's kind of faded,

985
00:53:17,640 --> 00:53:21,800
Speaker 2: that it's like on track, maybe because it's not, because

986
00:53:21,840 --> 00:53:25,840
Speaker 2: it feels like different than like artistic you know, creations

987
00:53:25,880 --> 00:53:29,600
Speaker 2: where it's like the scientific discoveries and history are bound

988
00:53:29,640 --> 00:53:33,480
Speaker 2: by nature, and so because they're discovering things about nature,

989
00:53:33,640 --> 00:53:37,360
Speaker 2: just kind of feels inevitable that it would have developed

990
00:53:37,360 --> 00:53:37,600
Speaker 2: in the.

991
00:53:37,520 --> 00:53:38,319
Speaker 3: Way that it did.

992
00:53:38,920 --> 00:53:42,080
Speaker 2: Could you talk about some reasons for thinking that actually

993
00:53:43,040 --> 00:53:47,399
Speaker 2: the history of human science is somewhat contingent, and how

994
00:53:47,480 --> 00:53:50,280
Speaker 2: that could undermine our belief that aliens would develop science

995
00:53:50,320 --> 00:53:51,360
Speaker 2: along the same tracks.

996
00:53:52,040 --> 00:53:53,960
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is really fun. I got to dig into

997
00:53:54,000 --> 00:53:55,839
Speaker 3: a lot of the history here, and I agree with you.

998
00:53:56,560 --> 00:53:59,200
Speaker 3: I used to think of the history of science as inevitable.

999
00:53:59,560 --> 00:54:02,040
Speaker 3: I plead civilization for example, and you know you have

1000
00:54:02,080 --> 00:54:03,960
Speaker 3: to develop this, and then gunpowdern and then you can

1001
00:54:03,960 --> 00:54:06,440
Speaker 3: build this, and it feels sort of like a natural progression.

1002
00:54:08,239 --> 00:54:10,040
Speaker 3: But you know, there's a lot of moments in the

1003
00:54:10,080 --> 00:54:13,399
Speaker 3: history of science that were random, that were accidental, where

1004
00:54:13,440 --> 00:54:17,280
Speaker 3: we discovered something that we could have discovered much earlier,

1005
00:54:17,320 --> 00:54:20,040
Speaker 3: and it could have totally changed the path of our science.

1006
00:54:20,160 --> 00:54:21,480
Speaker 3: And this is one of the reasons I wrote the

1007
00:54:21,480 --> 00:54:23,480
Speaker 3: book in the structure I did with this Drake equation

1008
00:54:23,880 --> 00:54:26,520
Speaker 3: structure because it let me make some assumptions, Like at

1009
00:54:26,520 --> 00:54:27,960
Speaker 3: this point in the book, I'm saying, all right, let's

1010
00:54:28,080 --> 00:54:31,160
Speaker 3: push aside all of the philosophical questions. Let's assume aliens

1011
00:54:31,200 --> 00:54:33,600
Speaker 3: do science, they use math, they ask the same questions,

1012
00:54:33,640 --> 00:54:36,239
Speaker 3: they're interested in the same stuff as us. Even then,

1013
00:54:37,280 --> 00:54:40,239
Speaker 3: how similar or different might their science be? Or like,

1014
00:54:40,280 --> 00:54:43,600
Speaker 3: take aliens out of the equation, imagine running the earth

1015
00:54:44,440 --> 00:54:47,600
Speaker 3: a million times, you know, and even start from like

1016
00:54:47,680 --> 00:54:50,360
Speaker 3: humans have formed one hundred thousand years ago, When do

1017
00:54:50,400 --> 00:54:52,799
Speaker 3: they become technological? How long does that take? What does

1018
00:54:52,800 --> 00:54:55,960
Speaker 3: that civilization look like? What science do they develop? Are

1019
00:54:55,960 --> 00:55:00,200
Speaker 3: we typically late or early compared to that population? Love

1020
00:55:00,280 --> 00:55:02,680
Speaker 3: to know the answer to that question, you know, what

1021
00:55:02,840 --> 00:55:06,320
Speaker 3: is the path of science in all of those different earths?

1022
00:55:06,360 --> 00:55:09,040
Speaker 3: And so we can't know that, but we do have

1023
00:55:09,040 --> 00:55:11,760
Speaker 3: some glimmers, you know. I was able to like dig

1024
00:55:11,840 --> 00:55:17,280
Speaker 3: into ancient human civilizations Mayans and Chinese and the Greeks

1025
00:55:17,719 --> 00:55:19,600
Speaker 3: before they really talk to each other. It's sort of

1026
00:55:19,600 --> 00:55:24,080
Speaker 3: like a little mini experiment to compare proto scientific development

1027
00:55:24,080 --> 00:55:27,680
Speaker 3: to see how similar it was. But actually, before we gether,

1028
00:55:27,760 --> 00:55:30,120
Speaker 3: you asked about like more recent developments. One of my

1029
00:55:30,200 --> 00:55:32,640
Speaker 3: favorites is the discovery of X rays, which was you know,

1030
00:55:32,760 --> 00:55:36,600
Speaker 3: essentially just accidental. Guy left a source on top of

1031
00:55:36,640 --> 00:55:40,239
Speaker 3: a photographic sheet, came back over the weekend, found this thing,

1032
00:55:40,680 --> 00:55:44,439
Speaker 3: He wrote it up, published it the next day, beat

1033
00:55:44,520 --> 00:55:47,600
Speaker 3: some English guy by.

1034
00:55:46,760 --> 00:55:48,759
Speaker 2: I got his wife to stick her hand in front

1035
00:55:48,760 --> 00:55:49,000
Speaker 2: of it.

1036
00:55:49,520 --> 00:55:53,880
Speaker 3: Exactly, and you know, made this discovery. And all the

1037
00:55:53,920 --> 00:55:56,560
Speaker 3: tools were there, like people have been using uranium for

1038
00:55:56,600 --> 00:55:59,600
Speaker 3: a long time, and we had photography for a while,

1039
00:55:59,680 --> 00:56:01,799
Speaker 3: so you could have discovered that much much earlier. It

1040
00:56:01,840 --> 00:56:05,799
Speaker 3: was really just an accident. And so I like to imagine, well,

1041
00:56:05,840 --> 00:56:07,680
Speaker 3: what if we had what if we had made that

1042
00:56:07,680 --> 00:56:11,200
Speaker 3: discovery decades or centuries earlier, because that discovery is what

1043
00:56:11,360 --> 00:56:15,160
Speaker 3: kicked off like the Curees and their analysis of radiation,

1044
00:56:15,800 --> 00:56:18,239
Speaker 3: and then you know Rutherford and his analysis of the

1045
00:56:18,320 --> 00:56:21,840
Speaker 3: nucleus and like basically quantum mechanics right, that was the

1046
00:56:21,920 --> 00:56:25,080
Speaker 3: moment that kicked off everything that led to quantum mechanics.

1047
00:56:25,160 --> 00:56:27,920
Speaker 3: What if that had happened one hundred years earlier. What

1048
00:56:28,120 --> 00:56:32,440
Speaker 3: if little Einstein was taught quantum mechanics in the crib,

1049
00:56:33,040 --> 00:56:36,200
Speaker 3: then when he was developing his theory of general relativity,

1050
00:56:36,760 --> 00:56:40,560
Speaker 3: would he have come up with some quantum version. I mean,

1051
00:56:40,640 --> 00:56:44,400
Speaker 3: it's it's just one example, but it shows you how

1052
00:56:44,719 --> 00:56:47,680
Speaker 3: randomness affects the development of our science and it could

1053
00:56:47,680 --> 00:56:50,879
Speaker 3: have taken us on different paths. And so the fact

1054
00:56:50,920 --> 00:56:54,560
Speaker 3: that we're stuck right now unifying quantum mechanics and gravity

1055
00:56:54,960 --> 00:56:57,800
Speaker 3: and that even Einstein wasn't able to do it, maybe

1056
00:56:57,800 --> 00:57:00,640
Speaker 3: it's because we started too late with quantu caad And

1057
00:57:00,640 --> 00:57:04,920
Speaker 3: if quantum mechanics was more intuitive to the smarty pants

1058
00:57:04,920 --> 00:57:06,840
Speaker 3: in the last one hundred years, maybe we would have

1059
00:57:06,880 --> 00:57:10,759
Speaker 3: made more progress. Or maybe there's some other crazy and

1060
00:57:10,880 --> 00:57:13,839
Speaker 3: kind of obvious discovery we haven't made yet and on

1061
00:57:13,960 --> 00:57:16,680
Speaker 3: all the other earths they have and so they're like

1062
00:57:16,840 --> 00:57:19,520
Speaker 3: way far ahead of us because we just haven't like

1063
00:57:19,560 --> 00:57:23,560
Speaker 3: stumbled across XYZ, you know. Or maybe we're very far

1064
00:57:23,600 --> 00:57:27,400
Speaker 3: ahead and most earths they're still using stone tools. Who knows,

1065
00:57:27,480 --> 00:57:30,640
Speaker 3: but It would certainly affect what it's like to talk

1066
00:57:30,680 --> 00:57:33,760
Speaker 3: to aliens. You know, are they on the same single

1067
00:57:33,840 --> 00:57:36,920
Speaker 3: path that we are on? Are there multiple paths up

1068
00:57:36,960 --> 00:57:38,960
Speaker 3: this sort of mountain to figure out the nature of

1069
00:57:39,000 --> 00:57:41,960
Speaker 3: the universe? And where did their path diverge? You know,

1070
00:57:42,040 --> 00:57:46,080
Speaker 3: did they start totally differently from us or do they

1071
00:57:46,120 --> 00:57:49,600
Speaker 3: just like randomly discover things in a different order. Really

1072
00:57:49,640 --> 00:57:52,160
Speaker 3: really fascinating to learn that, and so that's why I

1073
00:57:52,240 --> 00:57:55,160
Speaker 3: dug into the sort of ancient history. You know, we're

1074
00:57:55,200 --> 00:57:59,320
Speaker 3: the Mayans being mathematical. If the Mayans, for example, had

1075
00:57:59,360 --> 00:58:03,800
Speaker 3: not been devastated by the Spanish, what would their mathematics

1076
00:58:03,840 --> 00:58:06,480
Speaker 3: and science be like right now? That would be fascinating

1077
00:58:06,560 --> 00:58:08,960
Speaker 3: to know. It's such a tragedy. You know, they might

1078
00:58:09,040 --> 00:58:12,000
Speaker 3: have a very different way to think about the universe

1079
00:58:12,040 --> 00:58:14,959
Speaker 3: and to express it. They certainly were on the road

1080
00:58:15,000 --> 00:58:18,280
Speaker 3: to doing that when the Europeans got there. Their predictions

1081
00:58:18,320 --> 00:58:21,560
Speaker 3: for like motions of stars and moons were more accurate

1082
00:58:21,640 --> 00:58:25,960
Speaker 3: than the European predictions. So you know, we certainly lost

1083
00:58:25,960 --> 00:58:26,880
Speaker 3: a whole thread there.

1084
00:58:27,640 --> 00:58:30,480
Speaker 2: Okay, if your game for this, here's the part where

1085
00:58:30,640 --> 00:58:33,600
Speaker 2: I would like you to speculate. I want you to

1086
00:58:33,680 --> 00:58:37,440
Speaker 2: voice your hunches, if you have a guess or a

1087
00:58:37,480 --> 00:58:41,600
Speaker 2: suspicion about what is most likely the limiting factor in

1088
00:58:41,880 --> 00:58:46,080
Speaker 2: the original Drake equation, like which of those variables you

1089
00:58:46,120 --> 00:58:48,440
Speaker 2: know may be multiple, but which of them is most

1090
00:58:48,520 --> 00:58:51,400
Speaker 2: likely to be near zero and is the reason we're

1091
00:58:51,400 --> 00:58:55,880
Speaker 2: not hearing from anybody? And then secondly, what do you

1092
00:58:55,880 --> 00:58:59,360
Speaker 2: think is most likely to be the filter preventing the

1093
00:58:59,480 --> 00:59:01,160
Speaker 2: alien physics conference?

1094
00:59:02,480 --> 00:59:06,360
Speaker 3: Yeah, my hunch, again not scientifically, is that there's life

1095
00:59:06,440 --> 00:59:09,280
Speaker 3: everywhere in the universe, that it's all over. You know

1096
00:59:10,120 --> 00:59:14,400
Speaker 3: that maybe the fraction of planets that have life is small,

1097
00:59:14,680 --> 00:59:18,000
Speaker 3: but it can't be that small. You know, it doesn't

1098
00:59:18,040 --> 00:59:20,720
Speaker 3: seem like we're that special. So I think there's probably

1099
00:59:20,800 --> 00:59:24,720
Speaker 3: at least microbial life everywhere. How often do you get

1100
00:59:24,760 --> 00:59:28,480
Speaker 3: like complex multicellular life, I don't know. But still my

1101
00:59:28,640 --> 00:59:31,640
Speaker 3: hunch is that the denominator is big enough to tolerate

1102
00:59:31,640 --> 00:59:34,200
Speaker 3: a small fraction and that the final result is still

1103
00:59:34,200 --> 00:59:36,360
Speaker 3: going to be large. So I'm going to imagine that

1104
00:59:36,400 --> 00:59:41,080
Speaker 3: the universe is filled with technological aliens, and you know,

1105
00:59:41,080 --> 00:59:43,840
Speaker 3: we haven't heard from them because we don't understand their signals,

1106
00:59:44,320 --> 00:59:47,440
Speaker 3: or because you know, time and space have prevented them

1107
00:59:47,440 --> 00:59:50,480
Speaker 3: from coming here or communicating with us. So I think that,

1108
00:59:50,600 --> 00:59:54,160
Speaker 3: you know, we're starting from a good number. I think

1109
00:59:54,200 --> 00:59:57,280
Speaker 3: that when they do arrive, that we are going to

1110
00:59:57,320 --> 01:00:01,400
Speaker 3: be shocked by how human are so sciences. I mean,

1111
01:00:01,440 --> 01:00:03,640
Speaker 3: I think I persuaded myself when I was writing this

1112
01:00:03,680 --> 01:00:06,960
Speaker 3: book that there's a lot of assumptions we're making that

1113
01:00:07,040 --> 01:00:09,240
Speaker 3: you know, they're not going to have coffee and croissants

1114
01:00:09,240 --> 01:00:11,920
Speaker 3: for breakfast. They're going to be so much weirder than

1115
01:00:11,960 --> 01:00:16,040
Speaker 3: we imagine, because even on Earth, life is always weirder

1116
01:00:16,040 --> 01:00:20,960
Speaker 3: than we imagine, always discovering super weird, gunky stuff, and

1117
01:00:21,120 --> 01:00:25,520
Speaker 3: so it's sort of it's really just hubris to imagine

1118
01:00:26,000 --> 01:00:29,080
Speaker 3: that our way of thinking and our way of doing

1119
01:00:29,120 --> 01:00:31,800
Speaker 3: things is the only way, is the best way to me.

1120
01:00:31,840 --> 01:00:36,080
Speaker 3: It's equivalent to like geocentrism, you know, to put ourselves

1121
01:00:36,080 --> 01:00:38,240
Speaker 3: at the center of the intellectual universe and say this

1122
01:00:38,320 --> 01:00:40,560
Speaker 3: is the only way. And I'm looking forward to that.

1123
01:00:41,120 --> 01:00:43,360
Speaker 3: I want my mind blown. I want it to be

1124
01:00:43,440 --> 01:00:46,520
Speaker 3: bizarre and difficult. I wanted to take decades to understand

1125
01:00:47,200 --> 01:00:50,680
Speaker 3: what they're even talking about and how they think about things,

1126
01:00:50,720 --> 01:00:54,080
Speaker 3: because then we're going to learn something about ourselves, not

1127
01:00:54,120 --> 01:00:57,280
Speaker 3: just the aliens. We're going to learn about what's unusual

1128
01:00:57,320 --> 01:01:01,360
Speaker 3: about us. Where do we stand? Is weird about being human?

1129
01:01:01,400 --> 01:01:03,160
Speaker 3: And it's going to help define what it means to

1130
01:01:03,200 --> 01:01:05,600
Speaker 3: be human and to be a human scientist. This is

1131
01:01:05,640 --> 01:01:07,560
Speaker 3: how we think about things, This is how we ask

1132
01:01:07,560 --> 01:01:09,760
Speaker 3: about things. These are kind of answers that we find

1133
01:01:09,880 --> 01:01:13,520
Speaker 3: satisfying and that we accept and don't ask more questions about.

1134
01:01:13,600 --> 01:01:16,520
Speaker 3: And these are the things that drive us and make

1135
01:01:16,600 --> 01:01:20,440
Speaker 3: us curious. You know, so I think, I hope, I

1136
01:01:20,440 --> 01:01:23,440
Speaker 3: guess I have a hunch, and I hope that aliens

1137
01:01:23,480 --> 01:01:27,000
Speaker 3: do science in a much weirder way than anybody imagines

1138
01:01:27,120 --> 01:01:29,600
Speaker 3: that even is imagined in this book, right. I don't

1139
01:01:29,600 --> 01:01:31,680
Speaker 3: claim that what we've described in this book spans the

1140
01:01:31,720 --> 01:01:33,560
Speaker 3: whole space of ideas. I just want to give people

1141
01:01:33,600 --> 01:01:36,520
Speaker 3: a flavor that there are many ideas out there that

1142
01:01:36,600 --> 01:01:39,200
Speaker 3: we haven't even imagined because we might not have the

1143
01:01:39,240 --> 01:01:42,160
Speaker 3: capacity to think outside of our little box.

1144
01:01:43,000 --> 01:01:46,880
Speaker 2: The book is called Do Aliens Speak Physics? Daniel Whitson,

1145
01:01:46,920 --> 01:01:48,600
Speaker 2: thank you so much for joining us today.

1146
01:01:48,880 --> 01:01:52,440
Speaker 3: Thank you very much, super fun and conversation. Thank you.

1147
01:01:54,560 --> 01:01:58,360
Speaker 2: All right, so much appreciation to Daniel Whitson, for joining

1148
01:01:58,440 --> 01:02:02,240
Speaker 2: us today. The book Do As Speak Physics is slated

1149
01:02:02,280 --> 01:02:05,440
Speaker 2: for release on November fourth, twenty twenty five, but you

1150
01:02:05,480 --> 01:02:08,360
Speaker 2: can pre order your copy now. And if you want

1151
01:02:08,360 --> 01:02:11,080
Speaker 2: to check out Daniel's podcast, it is called Daniel and

1152
01:02:11,200 --> 01:02:16,160
Speaker 2: Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. If you're new to the show, Stuff

1153
01:02:16,200 --> 01:02:19,000
Speaker 2: to Blow Your Mind is a science and culture podcast

1154
01:02:19,120 --> 01:02:22,520
Speaker 2: with core episodes publishing on Tuesdays and Thursdays of every week.

1155
01:02:22,720 --> 01:02:26,000
Speaker 2: Usually I'm joined by my regular co host, Robert Lamb

1156
01:02:26,000 --> 01:02:29,320
Speaker 2: for those, and then also on Fridays we do a

1157
01:02:29,320 --> 01:02:32,840
Speaker 2: different kind of show called Weird House Cinema, which is

1158
01:02:32,920 --> 01:02:34,040
Speaker 2: just about weird movies.

1159
01:02:34,280 --> 01:02:34,720
Speaker 3: They can be.

1160
01:02:35,120 --> 01:02:38,880
Speaker 2: Old, new, good, bad, well known, or obscure. The only

1161
01:02:38,920 --> 01:02:42,000
Speaker 2: real criterion is they've got to be weird, So we

1162
01:02:42,040 --> 01:02:44,600
Speaker 2: do that on Fridays. On Wednesdays we usually have a

1163
01:02:44,640 --> 01:02:48,880
Speaker 2: short form episode. On Saturdays and Mondays we feature older

1164
01:02:48,960 --> 01:02:51,800
Speaker 2: episodes of the shows. You'll get a rerun of a

1165
01:02:51,800 --> 01:02:54,600
Speaker 2: core episode from the Vault on Saturdays and a Weird

1166
01:02:54,640 --> 01:02:57,280
Speaker 2: House Cinema rewind on Mondays.

1167
01:02:58,480 --> 01:02:59,080
Speaker 3: Let's see.

1168
01:02:59,440 --> 01:03:01,720
Speaker 2: If you would like to follow us on social media,

1169
01:03:01,800 --> 01:03:04,760
Speaker 2: you can find us there. We're on I think most

1170
01:03:04,800 --> 01:03:07,919
Speaker 2: of the major places, some we're called something like blow

1171
01:03:08,000 --> 01:03:11,560
Speaker 2: the Mind or stuff to Blow your Mind, and I

1172
01:03:11,560 --> 01:03:14,480
Speaker 2: guess that does it. So huge thanks as always to

1173
01:03:14,600 --> 01:03:19,320
Speaker 2: our excellent audio producer JJ Posway, and today big thanks

1174
01:03:19,320 --> 01:03:22,960
Speaker 2: again to Daniel Whitson for joining us. If you would

1175
01:03:22,960 --> 01:03:24,920
Speaker 2: like to get in touch with us with feedback on

1176
01:03:24,960 --> 01:03:27,440
Speaker 2: this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for

1177
01:03:27,520 --> 01:03:30,360
Speaker 2: the future, or just to say hello, you can email

1178
01:03:30,440 --> 01:03:41,880
Speaker 2: us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

1179
01:03:42,000 --> 01:03:44,960
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For

1180
01:03:45,040 --> 01:03:47,800
Speaker 1: more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,

1181
01:03:47,960 --> 01:04:01,400
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.

1182
01:04:01,880 --> 01:04:03,040
Speaker 1: Ter ter ter ter