Speaker 1: You're listening to Part Time Genius, a production of Kaleidoscope
Speaker 1: and iHeartRadio. Guess what Will?
Speaker 2: What's that? Mango?
Speaker 1: Do you know there are more than one hundred billion
Speaker 1: stars in our galaxy alone and more than one hundred
Speaker 1: billion galaxies in the universe, And also that scientists have
Speaker 1: estimated that of all the stars that exists, somewhere between
Speaker 1: ten and thirty percent have Earth like planets, which means
Speaker 1: the odds of us truly being alone in the universe
Speaker 1: is practically zero.
Speaker 2: You should probably go and say it. Are you saying
Speaker 2: aliens are real?
Speaker 1: No? I'm saying what if? Where the aliens? And somewhere
Speaker 1: on some distant planet, a couple of Neon green best
Speaker 1: friends are recording a podcast about us.
Speaker 2: You know, I never thought about it that way, And
Speaker 2: I'm curious, have you been watching X Files again?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 1: Something so much better. I read this incredible book called
Speaker 1: Do Aliens Speak?
Speaker 2: Physics?
Speaker 1: And Other Questions about Science and the nature of Reality?
Speaker 1: And it is hilarious, which you know, I never thought
Speaker 1: i'd say about a book about physics or philosophy. But
Speaker 1: it's also this really fascinating exploration of the idea that
Speaker 1: we're not alone in the universe, and that other intelligent
Speaker 1: life may have evolved the ability to study science and
Speaker 1: the same way or in a completely different way than us.
Speaker 1: So what does that mean for us humans? If aliens
Speaker 1: ever do land here, will we be able to have
Speaker 1: a great meeting of the minds or will we just
Speaker 1: stare at each other in total confusion. Luckily, the book's
Speaker 1: co author Daniel Whitson, who is an actual physicist and
Speaker 1: a friend of yours and mine, agreed to talk it
Speaker 1: through with thee so we had such a great conversation.
Speaker 1: I'm really excited to dive in. So I am here
Speaker 1: with Daniel Whitson, who I've known for quite a while,
Speaker 1: but he's just put out this book Do Aliens speak physics?
Speaker 1: And other questions about science and the nature of reality?
Speaker 1: And Daniel, I've had this galley for a while and
Speaker 1: it is really just so exciting and lovely and the
Speaker 1: joyous read, but also something that's like way more philosophical
Speaker 1: than I was expecting. So I'm very excited to get
Speaker 1: into this. But one of our first questions, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm sure this happens to you at a lot of parties.
Speaker 1: You introduce yourself one says, oh, what do you do
Speaker 1: when you say I'm a particle physicist, and then they're like, okay,
Speaker 1: so what do you do? And I'm curious, how do
Speaker 1: you answer this?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 4: I usually start with a song because I heard an
Speaker 4: amazing particle physics Explained by song episode on Part Time Genius,
Speaker 4: and I thought that is the best way to explain
Speaker 4: what we do. You know, we smash protons together at
Speaker 4: nearly the speed of light and try to understand what
Speaker 4: is the nature of matter. But that's a big project.
Speaker 4: It's thousands of people, it's billions of dollars. What do
Speaker 4: I actually do? The best thing about particle physics is
Speaker 4: that it's a big community, and so we all get
Speaker 4: to specialize. There is somebody who really loves making the
Speaker 4: collider work, and somebody else who really loves tuning the
Speaker 4: ectro links to work super fast. My personal niche is
Speaker 4: in the data analysis and the statistics. I am a
Speaker 4: statistics nerd and I love programming, so I ended up
Speaker 4: doing a lot of machine learning and statistics. I'm the
Speaker 4: guy who like analyzes the data and says, do we
Speaker 4: see this particle or not? How can we squeeze a
Speaker 4: little bit more information. What if we use this new technique,
Speaker 4: what if we talk to our friends in AI. What
Speaker 4: if we bring in this machine learning pattern recognition thing?
Speaker 4: Can we squeeze a little bit more information out of
Speaker 4: this incredibly expensive and valuable data that tells us something
Speaker 4: about the universe.
Speaker 1: I love that. I also love the idea that making
Speaker 1: things collide as a kid, whether it's like trucks or
Speaker 1: cars or whatever, and then growing up and seeing the
Speaker 1: value and seeing these collisions and understanding them can animate
Speaker 1: a whole field of science.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it really is rooted in childhood curiosity first, because
Speaker 4: like the question we're asking, what's the universe made out of?
Speaker 4: It's a very simple question, right, It's a question people
Speaker 4: have been asking for a long long time. And also
Speaker 4: the technique in principle is simple, like let's take things apart.
Speaker 4: Let's smash our toy trucks together and see what comes out.
Speaker 4: Let's dismantle the toaster on the counter and see what's
Speaker 4: in it. And that's just what we're doing. Let's take
Speaker 4: stuff apart as much as we can, as powerfully as
Speaker 4: we can, and see what's inside, because we want to
Speaker 4: know what is everything? Mad I've one of the smallest
Speaker 4: bits of the universe what really determines who we are
Speaker 4: and why we're here.
Speaker 1: You know, from the first time I heard you talk,
Speaker 1: I was just so enamored with the way you explain things.
Speaker 1: And you've written a couple of books now, and they're
Speaker 1: really incredible explainers of the world and science and physics
Speaker 1: and the universe. And I'm curious, like, how did you
Speaker 1: get to this idea about encountering intelligent life and within
Speaker 1: the universe and exchanging science ideas with intelligent life? Like
Speaker 1: have you always been interested in aliens? Have you always
Speaker 1: wondered about this?
Speaker 5: Like?
Speaker 1: Where? Where does this obsession come from?
Speaker 4: Yeah, this obsession comes from just wanting to know the answers.
Speaker 4: One of the things that appealed to me about physics
Speaker 4: was the idea that it wasn't just a question we
Speaker 4: were asking here on Earth, that the questions we're probing
Speaker 4: were universal questions, not just like what is stuff on
Speaker 4: Earth made out of? But what is stuff on Jupiter
Speaker 4: made out of? What is stuff in the other star systems?
Speaker 4: What is stuff around the universe made out of? That
Speaker 4: appealed to me that these questions were universal, and so
Speaker 4: that makes me wonder if there are people out there,
Speaker 4: not people, but like other beings out there working on
Speaker 4: the same questions, and maybe they have the answers, And
Speaker 4: that's an incredibly powerful feeling of like, I don't know,
Speaker 4: envy or jealousy, Like what is if there are aliens
Speaker 4: out there that have been working on this for millions
Speaker 4: of years and they could just tell us the answers
Speaker 4: they know, right, Like it's fun to figure this out.
Speaker 4: But man, if somebody could just download the answers into
Speaker 4: my brain today, oh yeah, absolutely, I would press that
Speaker 4: button in a second. If I could like read Wikipedia
Speaker 4: from the future and just get like a general introduction
Speaker 4: to what people are thinking in a million years, I
Speaker 4: would definitely do that. And that's not possible, But it's
Speaker 4: sincerely likely that there are aliens out there and it's
Speaker 4: possible they're doing science and that makes me wonder if
Speaker 4: we could just take advantage of all of their knowledge.
Speaker 4: But then it also makes me a little bit skeptical
Speaker 4: because that idea is so tempting. It's also flattering. It
Speaker 4: says that the questions we're asking and the solutions we've
Speaker 4: begun to build, they're like at the center of the
Speaker 4: intellectual universe. It puts us right at the heart of it.
Speaker 4: It makes us important. And you know, anytime you have
Speaker 4: a theory that makes you at the center of the universe,
Speaker 4: you should be extras have to come of it, because
Speaker 4: you know, you want to believe it. And folks like
Speaker 4: Carl Seigen say aliens will come up with similar explanations
Speaker 4: for what's happening around their star as what's happening around ours,
Speaker 4: because the laws of physics are universal. But I wonder
Speaker 4: if the explanations are universal, if their description of it
Speaker 4: is universal can be translated, if we really could enact
Speaker 4: my fantasy of like an interstellar science conference and just
Speaker 4: skip forward into our scientific future.
Speaker 1: I think all of that's so fascinating, And this idea
Speaker 1: that science or physics could like possibly be a fundamentally
Speaker 1: human thing, you know, that exists within sort of like
Speaker 1: the boundaries of the human understanding and perception, and that
Speaker 1: aliens could actually be interpreting this universe in a very
Speaker 1: very different way.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because we don't have pure or unfettered access to
Speaker 4: the universe. We see the universe through our human lens,
Speaker 4: and we don't know without seeing it through another lens,
Speaker 4: like an alien lens. How to separate which parts of
Speaker 4: the interpretations were making our human and which parts are
Speaker 4: real and are true. And we like to assume that
Speaker 4: everything we're learning is deep and true and fundamental, and
Speaker 4: of course everybody else would also be doing string theory, right,
Speaker 4: but we don't know that. And so the book is
Speaker 4: really an exercise in asking, like, well, what can we
Speaker 4: say about how much humanity there is in our physics?
Speaker 4: And you mentioned earlier that the book has a surprising
Speaker 4: amount of philosophy in it. That's exactly the hook, because
Speaker 4: I originally wanted to write a book about is our
Speaker 4: physics discovered or invented? You know, is our physics the
Speaker 4: map or the territory? Is it human or is it universal?
Speaker 4: And I pitched this to my fourteen year old at
Speaker 4: the time, and he was like, yawn, boring, And I
Speaker 4: was so disappointed. I seriously thought he was going to
Speaker 4: be excited about that. But I took it to heart,
Speaker 4: and you know, you got to take notes when you
Speaker 4: get him. And so then I came back to him
Speaker 4: with this idea of, well, what if aliens arrived, can
Speaker 4: we talk to them about physics? And he was like, oh,
Speaker 4: I would read that book and I was like, it's
Speaker 4: the same book, and so I got to write my
Speaker 4: philosophy book. But in the context of this question about aliens,
Speaker 4: there's a lot of fascinating philosophical framing of your typical
Speaker 4: science questions that I thought people should be aware of,
Speaker 4: and so it gave me an excuse to read all
Speaker 4: of those books and talk to those philosophers, and also
Speaker 4: to get to answer what I thought was a really
Speaker 4: fun philosophical question, or at least tackle it. You know,
Speaker 4: there are no hard answers in philosophy.
Speaker 1: So you read about something called the Drake equation, which
Speaker 1: is pretty lengthy, but basically it lays out the conditions
Speaker 1: we'd need for aliens to contact us, and I'm wondering,
Speaker 1: can you explain that and is it really valid from
Speaker 1: a scientific perspective.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the Drake equation is fun because you first look
Speaker 4: at it, it's just a bunch of numbers multiplied together,
Speaker 4: and you're like, some guy got an equation named after him,
Speaker 4: or just multiplying numbers together, Like what you know, this
Speaker 4: is not the Schrodinger equation, This is not this lagrangea
Speaker 4: in a standard model physics. But the structure of the
Speaker 4: equation contains a really important insight. As you say, it's
Speaker 4: a way to try to estimate how many aliens there
Speaker 4: are out there that we might be capable of communicating with.
Speaker 4: And essentially it's fairly simple. It just says, start with
Speaker 4: the number of stars in the universe, and multiply by
Speaker 4: the fraction of those that have planets, and the fraction
Speaker 4: of those planets that have life, in the fraction of
Speaker 4: those planets with life that develop intelligence, and the fraction
Speaker 4: of those that develop civilization capable of sending signals. Then
Speaker 4: multiplied by how long they are around. And the crucial
Speaker 4: thing about the structure is because it's multiplication, if any
Speaker 4: of those numbers are zero, it's hopeless. It doesn't matter.
Speaker 4: If you have a trillion planets, if none of them
Speaker 4: have life, you still get in the answer zero. If
Speaker 4: you have a trillion planets and they're all covered with life,
Speaker 4: but it's just like slime and there's no intelligent life,
Speaker 4: you're still getting zero. You need stars, you need planets,
Speaker 4: you need life, you need civilization, you need technology. You
Speaker 4: need to happen at the right time, otherwise we're not
Speaker 4: hearing anything. And I took that as inspiration to extend
Speaker 4: and said, well, you know, that's cool, but I don't
Speaker 4: just want there to be aliens out there that maybe
Speaker 4: we get a message from. I want aliens to be
Speaker 4: out there who are scientific, who we have curiosity in
Speaker 4: common with, and whose answers we might be able to like,
Speaker 4: actually understand. And so I narrated even further. You know,
Speaker 4: I posed an even harder question than Drake and said,
Speaker 4: to answer the question like, how many aliens are there
Speaker 4: we can actually do science with, which has to be,
Speaker 4: of course, a smaller number than Drake's number, and maybe zero.
Speaker 1: But it feels like, you know, with the one hundred
Speaker 1: billion galaxies in the universe and billions of stars, and
Speaker 1: the estimation the ten to thirty percent of these stars
Speaker 1: of Earth like planets, right, I mean like it changes
Speaker 1: your perspective to the sense that maybe we aren't alone.
Speaker 1: I think there's something really exciting about that.
Speaker 4: Well, you're right, it's really exciting to live in a
Speaker 4: time when we are learning about one of those numbers
Speaker 4: that we didn't know before, right thirty years ago, with
Speaker 4: the fraction of stars that have planets around them totally unknown,
Speaker 4: we'd only seen like the few planets in our Solar system,
Speaker 4: and now he's seen thousands and thousands of planets around
Speaker 4: other stars. That's tremendously exciting that that number is big, right,
Speaker 4: thirty percent ish, like even if it's ten percent, Like,
Speaker 4: it's huge. There's billions of planets. That's wonderful news. But right,
Speaker 4: the Drake equation throws cold water on that because the
Speaker 4: other numbers we just don't know, like what is the
Speaker 4: fraction of those planets that have life on them? Because again,
Speaker 4: you got to have all those pieces in place, and
Speaker 4: we like to believe that there might be life out there.
Speaker 4: I'd like that to be the answer, But that's why
Speaker 4: we got to be skeptical, because we tend to believe
Speaker 4: things we want to be true, and you know, science
Speaker 4: is about the data.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's definitely true.
Speaker 1: So one of the things I love about this book
Speaker 1: is that it's filled with little cartoons and they show
Speaker 1: what would happen if, like, you know, aliens made contact
Speaker 1: with us. They're like funny and ridiculous that they just
Speaker 1: make the experience even more joyous. But it made me
Speaker 1: realize that so much of what shapes my thinking about
Speaker 1: alien contact comes from fiction and nonscience. And I was curious,
Speaker 1: are there any favorite sci fi depictions of aliens that
Speaker 1: inspired you or that you wish to be true?
Speaker 4: Obviously they were all true almost in a while. That's
Speaker 4: a great question. I think science fiction is undervalued. I
Speaker 4: think it's not really taken seriously enough because science fiction
Speaker 4: is where people get creative and they think about alternative universes.
Speaker 4: What if aliens are like this? What if aliens is
Speaker 4: are like that? And I love reading science fiction with
Speaker 4: aliens that surprise me, you know. I read Blind Site
Speaker 4: by Peter Watts totally blew me away, will not spoil it,
Speaker 4: but incredible aliens in that. I read Shroud by Alien Tchaikowski,
Speaker 4: very recent book, mind blowing aliens in that one really creative,
Speaker 4: or like the Aliens and Enders game, I think it's
Speaker 4: probably fair to spoil that one, you know, the hive mind,
Speaker 4: very creative. I really like Alistair Reynolds Aliens. So many
Speaker 4: great books out there, and I think these guys are
Speaker 4: doing the important work of thinking how different could aliens be,
Speaker 4: how alien could they be? Of breaking out of our
Speaker 4: human box and imagining other ways life and intelligence, and
Speaker 4: then maybe science could operate. And that's the hard part,
Speaker 4: right We don't know what's out there. We have this
Speaker 4: example of one and we extrapolate from it, and then
Speaker 4: we tried to tweak it, but we don't really know
Speaker 4: where the edges of the box are. And that's one
Speaker 4: of the reasons why I decided to work on this
Speaker 4: book with Andy Warner, because I thought it was really
Speaker 4: valuable to think concretely and visually.
Speaker 3: About what these aliens might be like.
Speaker 4: And he's a fantastic non fiction cartoonist, and I just
Speaker 4: cold emailed him and said, hey, want to work on
Speaker 4: a book about aliens together, and he wrote right back.
Speaker 3: I knew I had the right person.
Speaker 1: One of the things that's fascinating to me is just
Speaker 1: like a small detail in the book, but something I
Speaker 1: had never actually contemplated was that the word scientist wasn't
Speaker 1: even used until the eighteen thirties.
Speaker 4: I was shocked to learn that as well. And in
Speaker 4: writing this book, I did a lot of research into
Speaker 4: the history of science. For me, it's a great excuse
Speaker 4: to get to dig into these topics, and I thought
Speaker 4: that was really important as a way to show people
Speaker 4: that the way we think about science is something that's
Speaker 4: been happening on Earth for like a century ish. It's
Speaker 4: a very modern thing, and it could change. We see
Speaker 4: it changing, actually, like the context and the cultural institutions
Speaker 4: of science, and it matters. Like if aliens arrive, we think, oh,
Speaker 4: we'll send them our physicists. They'll be at the chalkboard
Speaker 4: talking about science. But like, who are they going to
Speaker 4: send Do they have physicists? Do they have beings in
Speaker 4: their culture who dedicate their whole life to understanding the
Speaker 4: universe that want to come and talk to us. Five
Speaker 4: hundred years ago, we might have sent our priests to
Speaker 4: go talk to visiting aliens. The process of science itself
Speaker 4: has been changing. You know, people imagine this this pop
Speaker 4: size story about like science being invented five hundred years
Speaker 4: ago by Galileo and Bacon and a few other white dudes,
Speaker 4: and like it's much more complicated than that. You know,
Speaker 4: the Greeks don't often get credit for experiments, but like
Speaker 4: they measured the radius of the Earth, and folks all
Speaker 4: over the globe we're like doing experiments and learning about
Speaker 4: the nature of the universe. And so science is a
Speaker 4: long history and we think it's still changing. So in
Speaker 4: a thousand years, we may be doing a very different
Speaker 4: kind of science than we are now in a way
Speaker 4: that we look back on and we think, wow, that
Speaker 4: was really primitive. Can you really call that modern science?
Speaker 4: And so of course we're interested in the questions the
Speaker 4: aliens are asking and the ideas they have, but also
Speaker 4: you have to wonder, like, are they doing science the
Speaker 4: way that we're doing it. It turns out to be
Speaker 4: a very human activity driven by our human emotions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean what was interesting to me too, is
Speaker 1: like this question of math and whether it's actually universal.
Speaker 1: You propose this question in the book, and how presumably
Speaker 1: like intelligent life would want to be able to count
Speaker 1: things with us, like food or offspring or whatever. And
Speaker 1: we know that animals on earth to this, but we
Speaker 1: don't know whether this is actually a basic element of intelligence.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly, it's something that's the foundation or the way
Speaker 4: we think, and so we imagine it might be, it
Speaker 4: should be, it must be. I don't know, at the
Speaker 4: foundation of the way everybody thinks. But that's very dangerous extrapolation.
Speaker 4: And this question, you know, is math something that we
Speaker 4: found in the universe, a feature of nature itself, or
Speaker 4: a shorthand in the way that we think, an insight
Speaker 4: into the way the human brain works. People have tried
Speaker 4: to understand this, and you know, there's great arguments on
Speaker 4: both sides. And I remember, for years I was deeply
Speaker 4: convinced that math was fundamental to the universe because it
Speaker 4: pops up so beautifully in physics and seems to fall
Speaker 4: out so naturally. I remember as a junior taking quantum
Speaker 4: mechanics and seeing this calculation that measures some property of
Speaker 4: a subatomic particle, and then they go off and they
Speaker 4: do the experiment and the two things agree to like
Speaker 4: eight decimal places. And I got chills because I felt like, Okay,
Speaker 4: this isn't some approximation. We've revealed the source code, man, like,
Speaker 4: this is how the universe decides what happens to an electron.
Speaker 4: I had that feeling. I was like, whoa, it's almost spiritual. Yeah,
Speaker 4: And so it is like math feels like so powerful,
Speaker 4: so unreasonably effective. It's very tempting to say it must
Speaker 4: be part of the universe. And you know, I got
Speaker 4: the amazing opportunity to talk to Num Chomsky about aliens
Speaker 4: because he answers all of his email, and I asked him, like,
Speaker 4: how would you start talking aliens? And he was like, yeah, arithmetic, right,
Speaker 4: one plus one equals two. You start from there. But
Speaker 4: the more you read in philosophy, the more you see
Speaker 4: there are two signs to this question. We know that
Speaker 4: math is very powerful for our science, but we don't
Speaker 4: know that it's necessary. It might just be that math
Speaker 4: is very powerful for us and feel so natural because
Speaker 4: it's part of who we are. We're not guaranteed that
Speaker 4: aliens have to find the same sort of mental shortcuts handy.
Speaker 4: They might have a different way of thinking and express
Speaker 4: it naturally and joyfully in another kind of intellectual language.
Speaker 1: I mean, part of what's so amazing about this book
Speaker 1: and this thought experiment, right is it really makes you
Speaker 1: contemplate how we as humans work, and you point out
Speaker 1: that there are words in certain languages that don't actually
Speaker 1: translate to specific things, or you only have an approximation
Speaker 1: of them, and all these communication barriers that exist just
Speaker 1: on this one planet. You know how insane it is
Speaker 1: to think about are immediately being able to communicate with
Speaker 1: an alien?
Speaker 4: I know, and I watched Contacts and I loved it,
Speaker 4: and I wish it would happen.
Speaker 3: But I am not very bullish on that prospect.
Speaker 4: And you know, I'm a huge fan of SETI, and
Speaker 4: I think we should be funding it and doing it,
Speaker 4: listening to this guy and all sorts of channels. Absolutely,
Speaker 4: But in writing this book, I've convinced myself that it
Speaker 4: might be impossible to get a message from space and
Speaker 4: actually decode it because translation is cultural and arbitrary. There's
Speaker 4: no set of symbols that have only one interpretation, and
Speaker 4: that means that you have to know how to invert
Speaker 4: it or deduce it, and that requires that you can
Speaker 4: recognize when you've done it right. Say we get a
Speaker 4: message from aliens and we're like, oh, maybe they this
Speaker 4: means this. How would you know it's correct if the
Speaker 4: ideas themselves are super alien? Right, And we have this
Speaker 4: hilarious example of this, it's wonderful, honestly, example of this
Speaker 4: with a Pioneer plaque which Carl Sagan and Frank Drake
Speaker 4: and folks designed to put on the Pioneer Probe, which
Speaker 4: is sent out into the Cosmos decades ago, and it's
Speaker 4: still out there and it carries this message from humanity.
Speaker 4: And you know, in their defense, I think they only
Speaker 4: were given two weeks to design this thing. So I
Speaker 4: don't know what I could have done two weeks, but
Speaker 4: they did their best to come up with ideas that
Speaker 4: might be easy to interpret, and so of course they
Speaker 4: didn't write it in English. They used simple pictograms, you know,
Speaker 4: like an image of a hydrogen atom that looks sort
Speaker 4: of the cartoon, you know, solar system orbital images of
Speaker 4: a hygen atom, to try to convey what might happen
Speaker 4: in the hydrogen atom, et cetera, et cetera. And I
Speaker 4: love the enthusiasm of it, but the chances that aliens
Speaker 4: get that and they look at it and they're like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 4: that's a hydrogen atom requires so much cultural commonality. I
Speaker 4: actually did an experiment where I showed the Pioneer plaque
Speaker 4: to a bunch of UCI physics ride students, Like what
Speaker 4: better audience could you hope for? These are like biological
Speaker 4: humans in the same culture studying physics, and they had
Speaker 4: no clue what this thing was. Right, They're young enough
Speaker 4: to not have seen it before, and so I think
Speaker 4: it's almost hopeless to imagine that some aliens are going
Speaker 4: to actually understand what Carl Seigen was trying to say,
Speaker 4: or that conversely, we could, which is in the book
Speaker 4: why I focused more on the scenario the aliens have arrived,
Speaker 4: because if they arrive, we do have a context in common.
Speaker 4: We're they're in the same place. We can point at
Speaker 4: things and we can try to work up from there
Speaker 4: to build some kind of connection.
Speaker 3: But it's going to be challenging.
Speaker 4: I mean, we have struggled to make contact with other
Speaker 4: intelligence species on our planet. Right, Whales are saying something
Speaker 4: to each other.
Speaker 3: What is it?
Speaker 4: We don't know, right, We've been working on it, like dolphins,
Speaker 4: who knows what they're trying to tell us. But if
Speaker 4: the aliens arrive, I think we have a shot at it.
Speaker 4: If we just get a message, it can just be
Speaker 4: like the Wow signal, just like a mystery forever.
Speaker 1: One of the other things that you pointed out, which
Speaker 1: I hadn't entirely thought about, was how we are curious species.
Speaker 1: We actually did just do a series on curiosity, but
Speaker 1: what you've mentioned is that we're curious about almost everything,
Speaker 1: and we're constantly making decisions about what to pay attention to.
Speaker 1: And then this example of that a tennis match, you
Speaker 1: washed the ball going back and forth, but you're probably
Speaker 1: not counting the blades of grass on the court, right,
Speaker 1: And how we use these inputs to organize our stories.
Speaker 1: And that really made me think differently, not just about
Speaker 1: how aliens are perceiving the Earth, but also about your
Speaker 1: communication example, right, like what we're sending makes it that
Speaker 1: much harder if what they're curious about and the way
Speaker 1: they perceive things is so different from the way we communicate.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, And we imagine that our senses give us like
Speaker 4: a revelation of the universe, but we know it's limited, right.
Speaker 4: We know that there's UV light and radio waves and everything.
Speaker 4: I'm not seeing that, And we also know there's like
Speaker 4: nutrinos and dark matter and curved space, time and all
Speaker 4: sorts of stuff going on that's invisible to us, And
Speaker 4: so we see a tiny slice of the universe. And
Speaker 4: you're right, like aliens could be communicating with us in
Speaker 4: any of these means. Maybe they're sending us gravitational waves,
Speaker 4: who knows. But more deeply than that, I think the
Speaker 4: nature of our senses really affects the kind of answers
Speaker 4: we accept about physics. It defines what we think is understandable.
Speaker 4: Like think about the explanation that you typically hear in
Speaker 4: popular science about a photon, Oh, it's a particle or
Speaker 4: it's a wave, or it's both. It's some weird combination. Right,
Speaker 4: What that is is a translation from the unfamiliar. A
Speaker 4: photon is actually some weird quantum object that's not a particle,
Speaker 4: it's not a wave. It's something new and outside of
Speaker 4: our intuition translated into the language of our minds. And
Speaker 4: it's not satisfying because that translation is imperfect. But we've
Speaker 4: insisted on it, right, We demand that everything be translated
Speaker 4: into some sort of natural, intuitive set of concepts that
Speaker 4: are defined by our experience, and I think our perception,
Speaker 4: and so I think if aliens have a very different
Speaker 4: set of perceptual tools, even if they, like us, build
Speaker 4: technologies to go beyond it, they still will be translating
Speaker 4: that back into their mental language. You know, the set
Speaker 4: of things that they would find acceptable as explanations might
Speaker 4: be very different from ours. And that drives our science,
Speaker 4: as you say, it's curiosity. The reason I'm a physicist
Speaker 4: is I'm just so curious about the way the universe
Speaker 4: works at the microscopical level. And somebody else is slashing
Speaker 4: around in the rainforest with wet sox because they just
Speaker 4: got to know how spiders reproduce or whatever. And that's
Speaker 4: awesome and I love it. And that's why we're not
Speaker 4: all particle physicists, which is good. And so there's a
Speaker 4: lot of human curiosity and a lot of the human
Speaker 4: perception I think, and the questions and the answers of science.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it does make you wonder too, right, But
Speaker 1: like there are all these miss stories of the universe,
Speaker 1: and like, is it that we haven't figured it out
Speaker 1: because it's impossible to do so, or is it because
Speaker 1: we're really limited by these human brains of ours?
Speaker 4: Right, it has dropped that nightmare scenario and it's right,
Speaker 4: what if it's impossible to figure out the universe? Yeah,
Speaker 4: And that's a great philosophical assumption because you know, at
Speaker 4: the heart of science is this assumption that the universe
Speaker 4: follows laws and that we can figure them out. Repeated
Speaker 4: experiments will reveal them. How do we know that, Well,
Speaker 4: it's worked for hundreds of years. We think the laws
Speaker 4: of physics are there and stationary. Right, But it is
Speaker 4: a philosophical assumption, and we don't know in every scenario
Speaker 4: if that's true. If there's some like region where the
Speaker 4: universe is chaotic in some way that's beyond explanation. Right, If,
Speaker 4: as some philosophers say, things just sort of happen by half,
Speaker 4: it could be the mind revolts at that idea, like
Speaker 4: that's impossible.
Speaker 3: Come on, the universe.
Speaker 4: There's something that's happening for a reason, and it has
Speaker 4: to But you know, there's so many times in the
Speaker 4: history of physics where the universe has revealed itself to
Speaker 4: be so counter to our intuition. The things we just
Speaker 4: assumed were obvious we're shown to not be true always.
Speaker 4: You know, like the idea that if an object is
Speaker 4: here and then it's there, that it has to go
Speaker 4: from here to there. Duh, right, But quantum mechanics says no,
Speaker 4: you can be here and then later you can be there. Oh,
Speaker 4: and in between can be an impossible barrier. So you
Speaker 4: didn't go from here to there. You were here and
Speaker 4: then you were there boom what. So you have to
Speaker 4: be alert to these assumptions. We don't know if the
Speaker 4: universe is figure out a bull or explain a bull,
Speaker 4: or if there is even a fundamental truth out there.
Speaker 4: The aliens could show up and they could be like, yeah,
Speaker 4: we've been working on our for millions of years, and
Speaker 4: there's this little bit that kind of works, and that
Speaker 4: little bit that kind of works. But there's no single truth.
Speaker 4: You can't stitch it all together and just one big
Speaker 4: glorious tapestry of knowledge and information. Right, that could be
Speaker 4: the future. And to me, wow, that's a nightmare because
Speaker 4: that means that there aren't answer to the deepest questions
Speaker 4: in the universe, right, please?
Speaker 3: I hope not.
Speaker 1: So. I know you talked about reaching out to Chomsky.
Speaker 1: Who else did you get to speak to in this
Speaker 1: process and what was the process of writing this book.
Speaker 3: Like for you?
Speaker 4: I talked to basically anybody who would talk to me.
Speaker 4: I cold emailed so many philosophers and historians. I interacted
Speaker 4: with Daniel Dannett before he passed about questions of like
Speaker 4: how much of the universe could we actually understand, which
Speaker 4: is super fascinating. I talked to lots of folks here
Speaker 4: at UC Irvine. We have a like top notch logic
Speaker 4: and philosophy of science department, and folks here really helped
Speaker 4: me understand some tricky things in philosophy. They all read
Speaker 4: the draft and that was a terrifying process. You know,
Speaker 4: you go off, you do this reading. It's not your area.
Speaker 4: You think you've understood it well enough to explain it
Speaker 4: to the general public. But to me, the accuracy is
Speaker 4: so important. So I sent it back to the experts.
Speaker 4: I was like, please shred this, like find something in
Speaker 4: this that you think might be a little misleading. And
Speaker 4: you know you're terrified when you get their notes back.
Speaker 4: But it's important, and it's better, of course to hear
Speaker 4: those things before you published than after. So for me
Speaker 4: it was like a joyful exercise of self education. I
Speaker 4: had never read Science Without Numbers by Heartreyfield, but I
Speaker 4: read that book, and i'd never read How the Laws
Speaker 4: of Physics Live by Nancy Cartwright, who suggests that there
Speaker 4: is no answer out there. So I read a lot
Speaker 4: of books on philosophy, and I talked to a lot
Speaker 4: of people, and I had a lot of fun. It's
Speaker 4: so much fun thinking and reading. I did a deep
Speaker 4: dive into the history of the development of science, because
Speaker 4: I wondered about alternative Earth's alternative paths, the thought experiment
Speaker 4: of like what if we hadn't wiped out the Mayan civilization,
Speaker 4: what astronomy would they be doing today and how different
Speaker 4: would it be? Or what if the Chinese had gone
Speaker 4: deep into math? And physics instead of diverting into material
Speaker 4: science and inventing gunpowder. You know, if you ran the
Speaker 4: experiment of like having a thousand earths, where would we
Speaker 4: all be scientifically? Would we all have eventually stumbled into
Speaker 4: the same stuff or would we be vastly different questions
Speaker 4: and answers. It's really fun to read about like ancient
Speaker 4: Mayan astronomers, and they recently found not just writings of minds,
Speaker 4: which tragically most of those were destroyed by the Spanish,
Speaker 4: but places where you could see them doing calculations or
Speaker 4: they're like trying to figure stuff out. So like thinking
Speaker 4: through these things, and it really made me want to
Speaker 4: be able to talk to them.
Speaker 3: I would love to get.
Speaker 4: In the minds of early people trying to solve these problems,
Speaker 4: tackling these big unknown questions of where we are in
Speaker 4: the universe without the benefit of all the giants that
Speaker 4: we stand on. So I had a great time. I
Speaker 4: learned so much writing this book, and I had a
Speaker 4: great time with Andy because I would write a first
Speaker 4: draft and he would add a bunch of stuff to it.
Speaker 4: He knows so much fascinating history of science and language.
Speaker 4: And then of course he did all of his Doodles,
Speaker 4: which I always look forward to seeing the first draft
Speaker 4: of because they're so clever and so insightful, and to me,
Speaker 4: it's a really important part of the book is to
Speaker 4: have these visuals, not just because they help explain, but
Speaker 4: they sort of lighten the mood a little bit. There's
Speaker 4: different kinds of science books out there. This is the
Speaker 4: ones that like, maybe you didn't really understand everything, but
Speaker 4: you felt like you were in the presence of a
Speaker 4: great mind. That's not my favorite kind of science book.
Speaker 4: I want people to really get it, and I want
Speaker 4: them to feel comfortable, and I feel like having cartoons
Speaker 4: and jokes, you know, it makes you feel like, hey,
Speaker 4: these guys don't take themselves too seriously, and also it
Speaker 4: mixes it up. You get like a big philosophical idea,
Speaker 4: then you get a dad joke and a mental.
Speaker 1: Break, which I appreciate and honestly like my dad's past.
Speaker 1: But my dad would have loved this book. You know.
Speaker 1: There's something so funny about what you're saying about just
Speaker 1: knowing that you're in the presence of someone great but
Speaker 1: not being able to decipher what the content is. There's
Speaker 1: an intro to a Gertrude steinbook that Bert Surf, who
Speaker 1: is the founder of Random House, included and in front
Speaker 1: of it, it's basically saying it's copying to the fact
Speaker 1: that he doesn't understand most of what she's saying, but
Speaker 1: it is publishing it because it's brilliant.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, there's a lot of great books out there,
Speaker 4: like you know, Hawking's book A Brief History of Time.
Speaker 4: I don't understand everything in that book. And then I think, like, well,
Speaker 4: what's it like for you know, a random person who
Speaker 4: doesn't know a PhD In physics? What fraction are they getting?
Speaker 4: And yet the book is widely popular, and I don't
Speaker 4: know if it's not read or if it's just read
Speaker 4: in a different way as people are just like you know,
Speaker 4: enjoy hearing from this great person. But to me, I
Speaker 4: want to make sure that everything in the book makes sense,
Speaker 4: that you get it, because to me, that's the point
Speaker 4: of science communication and not to denegrate anybody else's efforts.
Speaker 4: But I think is you know there's different approaches in
Speaker 4: mind is definitely make sure you get every bit of it.
Speaker 1: One thing I had a question about is you're obviously
Speaker 1: this very busy person you're a parent, You've got all
Speaker 1: this responsibility at the university in terms of teaching and research,
Speaker 1: and you also have a podcast, and somehow you've made
Speaker 1: time to write this book and get a fact checked
Speaker 1: and set out the philosophers all about stuff. I'm curious, like,
Speaker 1: how do you find time to write and what's the
Speaker 1: process of writing like for you?
Speaker 4: To me, I work on the fun stuff. So being
Speaker 4: a faculty member means you're constantly overload with with way
Speaker 4: too many things to do, but you also got to choose,
Speaker 4: like I'm gonna do this today, I'm gonna do that today.
Speaker 4: And so I'm at the point in my career where
Speaker 4: I can just like pick the fun bits focus on those,
Speaker 4: and to me, this is the fun bit. Like thinking
Speaker 4: about this stuff and reading about this stuff is exciting.
Speaker 4: I probably could have put out a few more physics
Speaker 4: papers if I hadn't written this book, but you know,
Speaker 4: I'm still putting out ten papers a year. I think
Speaker 4: I'm doing fine in that category. But to me, this
Speaker 4: is exciting, and I think it informs my physics. It
Speaker 4: makes me think broadly and gives me new ideas and
Speaker 4: connects me with people who think differently and I think
Speaker 4: it's really important as an academic not to get too
Speaker 4: narrowly focused in your sub sub sub sub subfield and
Speaker 4: to be inspired by people in adjacent area. So that's
Speaker 4: the story I told myself when I was like reading
Speaker 4: philosophy books instead of the reviewing some paper. But I
Speaker 4: was just pulled to it, you know, I was excited
Speaker 4: about it. I was curious about it. I wanted to
Speaker 4: read that next thing, I wanted to write this next bit.
Speaker 4: I just sort of like had a burning desire to
Speaker 4: work on it. And that's to me how I know
Speaker 4: that I've like found a project that I'm excited about
Speaker 4: because I'm just pulled to work on it all the time.
Speaker 5: I love that.
Speaker 1: So, assuming there is intelligent, scientific alien life out there,
Speaker 1: and assuming we have a way to communicate with it,
Speaker 1: which is a lot of assuming, what is the one
Speaker 1: question you'd like to ask and what's the one thing
Speaker 1: you try to explain?
Speaker 4: Man, why do I just get one question? You know,
Speaker 4: got a long line of physicists. Everybody gets one question.
Speaker 4: You know, I think I've sort of voted with my feet.
Speaker 4: There's lots of questions about the universe you could ask,
Speaker 4: and the one I asked in my career is what
Speaker 4: is it made out of? Because yeah, I'd like to
Speaker 4: know lots of things about what's inside a black hole,
Speaker 4: et cetera, or how do the universe begin? But to me,
Speaker 4: the most important question is what are the bits? And
Speaker 4: are there even any Because if there are basic bits
Speaker 4: of the universe, if there's like some fundamental thing which
Speaker 4: just has to exist and defines the nature of the universe,
Speaker 4: it can't be taken apart, it always exists, it's not
Speaker 4: emergent or composite, then that tells you something deep about
Speaker 4: the universe itself. It reveals its inherent nature in a
Speaker 4: way that like chemistry doesn't and even particle physics. Now,
Speaker 4: because we don't think we found those pieces, we have
Speaker 4: these approximate theories that describe really zoomed out stuff. We
Speaker 4: don't really know what the universe is made out of.
Speaker 4: And I want to know that. Or if mind blowingly
Speaker 4: like it's not made of anything, it's just everything is
Speaker 4: made of smaller stuff, which is made of smaller stuff
Speaker 4: in infinite tower of craziness. I also want to know that.
Speaker 4: So that would be my number one question.
Speaker 1: And is there one thing you try to explain.
Speaker 4: I would hope that there's some cute bit of currently
Speaker 4: irrelevant mathematics that might solve some alien problem. I love
Speaker 4: how in the history of science we have this pattern
Speaker 4: where mathematicians develop some little bit of mathematics like group theory,
Speaker 4: not because it's useful, just because there are wonderful nerds
Speaker 4: who think patterns are fun, and they made up some
Speaker 4: games and like, oh, look at the cool stuff that
Speaker 4: comes out of this, and then one hundred years later
Speaker 4: physicists are like, oh, actually, that's what we need to
Speaker 4: solve this problem over here.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 4: You know, like group theory perfectly explains how fundamental particles
Speaker 4: interact in a way nobody expected when people were coming
Speaker 4: up with this stuff one hundred years earlier. And so
Speaker 4: maybe there some bit of weird human math that like
Speaker 4: clicks perfectly into an alien physics puzzle, and together, you know,
Speaker 4: our chocolate and their peanut butter can unravel the nature
Speaker 4: of the universe.
Speaker 1: I love that. That's a really lovely place to stop.
Speaker 1: You know, your book is so wonderful. It really is
Speaker 1: something that people should gift, people should read, and I
Speaker 1: think part of what's so amazing about it is one
Speaker 1: you got me to read philosophy two you got me
Speaker 1: to like really think about humans and what we know
Speaker 1: about ourselves.
Speaker 3: Well, thank you for reading it, and thank you for
Speaker 3: the kind words.
Speaker 4: And I hope that folks out there enjoy this tour
Speaker 4: philosophy with a little bit of aliens and if you
Speaker 4: enjoy thinking about physics in the universe. I have a
Speaker 4: fun podcast, Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3: Go check it out.
Speaker 1: It's wonderful. So thank you so much, Daniel, I really
Speaker 1: appreciate it.
Speaker 3: Thanks for having me on super fun conversation. Wow.
Speaker 2: Okay, first of all, this has totally changed the way
Speaker 2: I think about what would happen if aliens landed on Earth,
Speaker 2: because you know, we always talk in terms of alien invasions, right,
Speaker 2: and now I'm like, maybe they would just want to
Speaker 2: come here and tell us about their physics research.
Speaker 1: Yeah, more like an intergalactic science fair than an invasion.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean it sounds way more interesting and a lot
Speaker 2: less dangerous, of course. But it's funny because until today
Speaker 2: I'd never really thought about the practical implications of that
Speaker 2: term intelligent life in the universe, and this conversation maybe
Speaker 2: realize that if there's intelligent life out there, it's doing
Speaker 2: something with that intelligen I don't know, maybe science, maybe
Speaker 2: other stuff too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you could take that concept from the book and
Speaker 1: apply it to other disciplines, right, like alien philosophers, alien archaeologists,
Speaker 1: alien interior designers. You know, we have no idea if
Speaker 1: their approaches are universal and therefore similar to ours, or
Speaker 1: if they're operating in such an alien context that it's
Speaker 1: completely different.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we have no idea yet.
Speaker 1: That's right. Well, maybe someday, but while we await the
Speaker 1: answers to life, the universe and everything else. I would
Speaker 1: like to thank Daniel Whitson for coming on the show.
Speaker 1: He is so great. His book Do Alien Speak Physics
Speaker 1: is available now at your local bookstore, and if it's
Speaker 1: not at your local library, you can request it. There's
Speaker 1: also a link in our show notes and we will
Speaker 1: be back next week with another brand new episode. But
Speaker 1: from Will, Dylan, Gabe, Mary, and myself, thank you so
Speaker 1: much for listening. Part Time Genius is a production of
Speaker 1: Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted by Will Pearson
Speaker 1: and me Mongage Heatikler, and research by our good pal
Speaker 1: Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode was engineered and produced by
Speaker 1: the wonderful Dylan Fagan, with support from Tyler Klang. The
Speaker 1: show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norvel and
Speaker 1: Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay, trustee
Speaker 1: Dara Potts and Viney Shoring. For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope
Speaker 1: and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows.