Do Aliens Speak Physics, with Daniel Whiteson

In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Joe chats with Daniel Whiteson, co-host of the podcast "Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe" about Whiteson's upcoming book "Do Aliens Speak Physics," to be released November 4th.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Joe McCormick. Today on the podcast, we're going
to be featuring an interview in which I talked to
returning show guest physicist Daniel Whitson about his upcoming book,
Do Aliens Speak Physics. Daniel shared in advance copy of

(00:32):
this book with me and I think it's great. It
is a fascinating book length thought experiment that is full
of insights about what could be universal and what could
be unique in surprising ways about human intelligence, science, language, mathematics,
and culture. A bit of bio about Daniel. Daniel Whitson

(00:53):
is a particle physicist and physics professor. He's the co
host of the podcast Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe and
co author of We Have No Idea, also co creator
of the PBS kids show Eleanor Wonders Why. His book,
Do Aliens Speak Physics? Is co written and illustrated by

(01:14):
Andy Warner. And now onto my conversation with Daniel. Daniel Whitson,
Welcome back to the show.

Speaker 3 (01:23):
Thanks so much for having me on. Excited to talk
to you. Again.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
So the book is do aliens speak physics? And I
have really really been enjoying this book. I planned to
finish it with a full read for today, but my
last night, my toddler was having some sleep disturbances. That
was an all night thing, so I was rushing to
get through the last couple chapters. Maybe you can fill
me in with the greater detail that I missed in

(01:49):
the skimming of the last two or three.

Speaker 3 (01:51):
Maybe you should have read the book to you toddler
to help put them to sleep.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
Maybe I think she would really like the illustrations actually,
but the problem is I had digital version, so that
would involve showing it to her on a screen, which
is a whole other thing. You know, that just turns
into want to see other things on the screen. So
can't wait for my print copy. That'll be slighting. But
I guess we should start with the elevator pitch. What
is the central question you're exploring in this book.

Speaker 3 (02:17):
Yeah, the question the book asks is whether aliens do science,
and specifically physics, the same way we do. You know,
when aliens arrive, can they just tell us the secrets
of the universe? Can they leap us forward a thousand,
a million, a billion years into the scientific future. Is
science really just one track that way, one line and

(02:39):
we could just sort of like skip forward, you know,
with the benefits of all their time and energy. Or
is science more complicated? Is it multiple paths? Are there
multiple solutions? Do aliens even do science? So this book
is an exploration essentially of like how universal is our
theory of physics? Is what we're learning something about the

(03:01):
universe or is it something about the way we think?
Or both? And can we try to figure that out
before the aliens arrive.

Speaker 2 (03:09):
One of the metaphors or kind of shorthand that you
use in the book is the idea of an interplanetary
physics conference. You're asking the question, if we ever make
you undeniable contact with an alien species, can we get
our heads together and communicate meaningfully about the laws of physics?
And so to illustrate those kinds of meetings. One thing

(03:33):
I really liked about your book is that each chapter
comes with what you call a contact hypothetical, where you
kind of tell a little story. There's some fiction writing
in this book. It's mostly you know, nonfiction scientific writing
and philosophical writing. But I like these little fictional scenarios,
and I think we might want to get into a
couple of these as we go along. But before we
do that, to sort of frame how you explore the

(03:57):
question of do aliens speak physics? And could we communicate
about physics with them? You extend the classic Drake equation,
So could you explain that? Maybe first explain what the
original Drake equation is and how it works, and then
also explain the way you extend it and the terms
you added to it to get at this alien physics

(04:18):
conference question.

Speaker 3 (04:19):
Yes, so the Alien Physics Conference is in there because
it's a literal fantasy of mine, you know. I mean
I got into physics to understand the universe and I
want to figure it out. But sometimes I feel like, gosh,
progress is frustratingly slow, and you know what if there
are aliens out there that just have the answers, It's
so tantalizing and frustrating to think that, like somebody out

(04:42):
there has figured out what is quantum gravity? How do
you build wormholes? How did the universe begin? Like somebody
maybe knows these answers and they could just tell us,
beam them to us, email us your textbooks, you know, imagine,
you know, Newton getting to read Einstein's a relativity theory,
or you know, Aristotle getting to read modern physics, like

(05:03):
that could be us. Wow, so that's in there because
that's my literal, like I can taste it, but you know,
I also wonder if it's really true, and so I
sort of The book is a meditation on like, all right, Daniel,
calm down, Maybe those answers aren't actually out there. And
we wrote those little fictional interludes to try to give

(05:24):
like more concrete examples rather than just thinking theoretically about
the nature of physics and the structure of and the
philosophical underpinnings, like let's walk through what it might be
like to give people a concrete example. And also we
didn't want to tackle the whole question at once, like
it's a lot of pieces, and so we were inspired
by the way Drake took apart the question of are

(05:45):
there aliens out there? And why haven't we heard from them?
He broke that into pieces, and he starts by calculating
how many stars are in the universe, what fraction of
those stars might have life, what fraction of stars with
life develop civilization? How long do those civilizations. Last, it's
a classic approach in science. You have a problem that's
too big to solve, so you break it into a

(06:07):
bunch of pieces, none of which you maybe can solve,
but some of which you can make a little bit
of progress on. So you're not completely steymied by your
inability to make progress in one area because you can
move in another area. And for example, we now know
that there are lots and lots of stars in the universe.
Every galaxy that's out there has like hundreds of billions
of stars, and there's hundreds of billions of galaxies, so

(06:28):
the number of stars out there just in the observable
universe is very, very vast, and shockingly, we've made progress
on other aspects like how many planets does an average
star have? And the answer again is surprisingly big. You know,
there's a lot of uncertainty there and depends on how
you define earth like planet, but like something like twenty
five percent of stars out there have rocky planets that

(06:52):
are you know, earth like according to some definition, So
we're talking a huge number of earth like planets in
the universe. But you know, the Drake equation is multiplicative
the number of aliens that contact us is the number
of stars times the fraction that have life, times the
fraction that are technological, et cetera. So if any of
those numbers are zero, were screwed, and we don't know

(07:15):
what fraction of those planets have life, and what fraction
of that life becomes technological, and how long that life lasts.
So that's the structure of the Drake equation, and we
thought it was a natural thing to do to extend
that to answer the question how many alien civilizations are
there out there that we can talk science with? And
so to do that we broke it into several questions.
We said, well, what fraction them do science? You know,

(07:38):
is that even a thing aside of Earth is science
like a human endeavor? Maybe everybody else is bored by
the question, or you know, maybe they're technological but not scientific.
And then we asked, well, can we communicate with them,
you know, can we figure out a way to have
a mental mind meld about these things? Do they ask
the same kind of questions that we ask? Are are

(08:01):
we curious about the same things? Do they find and
accept intuitively the same kind of answers? Would they even
take the same path as we would So rather than
tackling this whole big question at once, and the whole
question and even its parts are essentially unanswerable, but to
even make some progress, we thought it was useful to
break it into some pieces.

Speaker 2 (08:21):
So let's look at a few of these pieces one
by one. One of the earliest questions you look at
in the book is the question do aliens wonder? Why
do they even have the motivation to pursue scientific questions.
It's hard for me to imagine that aliens would ever
develop the ability to travel or communicate between stars without

(08:46):
having something like science. Obviously, you can imagine us traveling
out and going to other star systems and finding bacteria
and other things that we wouldn't think of as technological
intelligences but are live on other planets. But assuming that
they are a to somehow get in contact with us,
a desire to understand and model the principles of how
reality works just seems like it would almost be a

(09:10):
must have. But you came up with a hypothetical contact
scenario to imagine this. Could you briefly describe kind of
sketch the contact scenario and then talk about some reasons
for thinking a species maybe could actually communicate between stars
or travel between stars without science.

Speaker 3 (09:28):
Yeah, this is really counterintuitive. And when I first started
digging into this, I also thought like, of course, you know,
everybody out there is going to be doing science because
they're gonna be curious about the universe and science is
the way to figure it out. But the more I
talk to historians and philosophers, the more I unders you know,
science has a lot of humanity in it, the structure,

(09:49):
the institutions, the process, and it's fairly recent. It's something
we've been doing, you know, in the way we call
science for only a few centuries, which is a blip
of time, and so it could be like an intermed
it stepped towards something greater, a better way to learn
about the universe. And so, you know, it's not that
I don't think that aliens are doing science. It's just

(10:09):
that I wanted to make the strongest argument I could
that maybe they aren't because you know, deeply, because deep down,
I feel like we're biased towards thinking aliens are going
to be like us, the sort of star trek fallacy,
like they're us with wrinkles on their forehead or with
pointy ears. Right, But fundamentally they're human, and I think
that that's narrow minded. So I'm trying to break out

(10:30):
of it. And you know, the book is an exercise
essentially convincing myself that aliens might be more alien than
we imagine. And so your question is, like, is it
possible to explore the stars, to come visit Earth and
not be scientific, to be deeply technological? And you only
have to look back at a history on Earth to
see that, Like, we have technology, well before we have science.

(10:53):
You know, people have been like fermenting yeast into bread
and beer, which is you know, fairly technological without understanding
anything about what was going on in it. Or people
have been making swords, you know, which requires if you
want to understand it, like pretty deep level knowledge of
like solid state physics and metallurgy. But there were masters

(11:13):
making incredible devices well before they understood why, and even
people exploring the earth. Right if you say science began
a few hundred years ago, well, humanity has been like
venturing from shore to shore for thousands of years. And
so I took that as an inspiration and try to
come up with an example of how aliens might get
here without being scientific. And I was thinking about a

(11:37):
planet where you have some critters and they're floating through
their oceans, and on their planet, the atmosphere is thicker
than it is on ours, and so the boundary between
the ocean and the atmosphere is a little fuzzier, and
so it's not so crazy to imagine that they might
stumble across some way to not just navigate their oceans,

(11:58):
but also navigate their atmospheres, you know, just like we did.
And in this case, these folks are like little bladders
that can absorb, can emit air into order to go up,
or accept ballast to go down. They're like little submarines essentially,
but they learn to navigate their atmosphere, and then it's
not too big a leap to imagine that maybe they
also figure out how to coat themselves in something so

(12:20):
they can navigate above the atmosphere through their solar system.
And in their solar system, they don't just have a star.
They have a binary star system, one of which is
a black hole, and so they spend millions of years
like whizzing around this black hole, and they develop an
intuitive understanding of space and curvature, so they don't have
an Einstein who's given them an equation. They just have

(12:41):
a feeling for curvature, you know, the way that curvature
is very counterintuitive to us. It's like, weird to think
about space being bent between here and there and distances
are oscillating, and what It's very hard for people to
really grock general relativity because we grew up in a
place where we imagine space is always flat. It's always
our experience. But what if you didn't, and what if

(13:01):
you spent millions of years whizzing around a black hole
and really experiencing curvature and somehow intuited your way into
manipulating spatial curvature and traveling the stars. And so that
was like hypothetical scenario to try to make a concrete
to give an example of how aliens could arrive here
with warped technology effectively and not be able to explain

(13:22):
it to us because they're like, what do you mean? Like,
here's how you do it? What do you mean why?
How Like.

Speaker 2 (13:29):
That kind of thing does seem hard to imagine, But
I like the way you really like put the work
in to sketch it out and compare it to I mean,
as you're saying it seems like it would depend on
a lot of trial and error, so it might be
a much slower process than the progress of human science
human technology. But a sort of branching question off of
that is, do you think the desire to understand why

(13:55):
to ask the question why is a core feature of
intelli or could that be a specific feature of just
human minds? You know, I was trying to think about this,
and I had a suspicion that I don't know. I
suspect that the question why has got to be pretty

(14:16):
fundamental to intelligence, because we define intelligence largely by the
ability to solve problems or learn, which is almost always
going to be accelerated by understanding underlying principles.

Speaker 1 (14:30):
But I don't know.

Speaker 2 (14:31):
I could definitely be missing things there. There are contingencies
I'm not seeing.

Speaker 3 (14:36):
I think you put your finger on the deepest part
of this question, and that's really what we're going to
get an answer to when the aliens come, is how
much overlap do we have with them? If they do
wonder why the same way we do, then we're going
to have a lot in common and we're gonna be
able to learn a lot from them. But if they don't,
then it's going to tell us something. It's going to
tell us that we are unusual in some way. And

(15:00):
that's really my fantasy. I mean, I got into this thinking, Wow,
it would be wonderful if aliens show up and they're
basically just like us, but further ahead, because then we
can zoom forward in science. But actually, I think that
might be the most boring outcome. It might be the
most amazing. We might learn the most, not necessarily about
quantum field theory, but about the nature of humanity and
intelligence and the experience of being alive in this universe.

(15:23):
If they're so fundamentally weird and different that they're like,
don't that these questions don't make sense to them, or
they don't even ask these questions, that they have another
way of having a relationship with the universe. Because I
agree with you, it feels like it's essential. It's part
of being intelligent, building a model in your mind and
probing that model and using it to solve your problem,

(15:43):
even if that problem is like, hey, how do we
take down this mammoth for dinner? Or you know, how
do I solve this social problem with my neighbor? You know,
which I think humans have been doing for hundreds of
thousands of years. But it could be not you know,
it could be that that's as fundamental as like eating
sweat things for breakfast. You know, the first time I
went traveling and I was like, hmm, wow, people have

(16:06):
like weird spicy fish soup for breakfast. I didn't even
imagine that you could have other kinds of things for breakfast.
Or the first time I saw like a toilet in
a country where like you don't just sit, you know,
I was like, oh, whoa mind blowing. There's so many
areas where we can't imagine beyond our experience, and I'm
hopeful when the aliens come that they're going to blow

(16:28):
our minds with their different way of having a relationship
with the universe. One of my favorite hypotheticals is maybe
they used to do science. Maybe science is some sort
of primitive way of understanding the universe, and what they
have is like you know, science plus the way we
think about natural philosophy, Like we look at Aristotle and
we're like, cool, bro, you made a lot of progress

(16:49):
just thinking about stuff. Why didn't you think about doing experiments?
You know, empiricism is obvious, like come on, just go
outside and try it for ten minutes. Why argue for
hours and hours and hours. It seems obvious to us.
And in that way, maybe the Aliens have upgraded their science, like, yeah,
we used to do it that way, but then we
came up with this other trick that's so much better.

(17:10):
I can't believe you guys are still doing experiments or whatever.
And so it could be that they don't do science
because they've left it behind for something even more powerful.

Speaker 2 (17:30):
So another one of the questions you look at is
assuming that aliens do ask the question why they do
have some kind of scientific understanding, would we be able
to communicate with them about it? And you asked this
in a number of different ways. I definitely want to
get into the question of math in just a second.

(17:51):
But before we look at math, I want to look
at difficulties in basic just language communication. And you draw
the analogy with differentficulties in deciphering lost human languages. Could
you talk a bit about that and how illuminating that
those kind of troubles we've faced in the past are.

Speaker 3 (18:10):
Yeah, this is fun because you know, we haven't met aliens.
If we don't know what Amilien language is like so
you can speculate endlessly, but I wanted to try to
dig into something more concrete. And the best example we
have of intelligent civilizations who are a little alien to
us are ancient human civilizations. So I thought, let's dig

(18:31):
into what was it like to try to translate the
writings of ancient intelligent human civilizations who are not around
to explain it to us, because I thought that would
be helpful to teach us, like what's important. How challenging
is this? When do we succeed? When do we fail?
And I'm kind of shocked to learn the answer, which

(18:52):
was that this is a lot harder than I thought.
I mean, these are humans, right, they have the same
brain as we do, they live in the same world
as we do, they have the same senses, that's the
same environment, and they have lots and they left us
lots of examples. But in some cases we still have
not decoded their writing. Like, yes, we decoded ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics,

(19:12):
there's an important caveat in that story, but we have not,
for example, decoded Etruscan writing. And the Etruscan's like lived
just a couple thousand years ago next to the Romans,
and the Romans talk all about them, and we have
lots of examples, and yet it still remains, you know, undecipherable.
It's incredible to me. It tells me that like the
barrier to accessing another intelligence, even one hosted on the

(19:36):
same substrate, is very, very challenging. And it hints that
in order to make these mental connections you need one
essential thing, which is common context. You need to be
able to like point at something and say, this is
an apple, right, let's agree on the word apple, or
you know, this is one, this is two. And you know,

(19:57):
I read a really interesting set of articles by the
folks at SETI, or actually anthropologists analyzing SETI, and you know,
their conclusion essentially was that it's hopeless if the aliens
communicate with us, if they send us a message SETI like,
but they don't show up, so we can't like point
to things and say, here's an apple, here's a doughnut.

(20:18):
That it's essentially impossible to decode just written language from
an alien species because we have no idea what it's
supposed to look like. How do you know when you've
decoded it correctly? You have no clues, no handles, and
the best example of that, I think is Egyptian hieroglyphics.
You know, there's this famous story the Rosetta Stone. They
had hieroglyphics, nobody could decode them. Then we found this

(20:40):
cheat sheet, right, it's got Greek on it, and it's
got the same stuff in hieroglyphics. Since you're like, oh,
I know how to translate these words from one to
the other, I can go from there, do dot dot,
I've cracked hieroglyphics. But that's not the way it happened.
The way it happened is they found the Rosetta Stone,
and it still took them twenty years. Twenty years when

(21:02):
they had examples of decoded text in both languages. Why
did it take so long Because they were making a
fundamentally mistaken assumption about the structure of hieroglyphics. They looked
at hieroglyphics and they were like, oh, these are pictograms.
The ones that look like birds are mean birds, someway.
The ones that looked like water mean water some way,

(21:22):
but they're not. Egyptian hieroglyphics turn out to be phonetic
in the same way that our language is, and so
like a hieroglyphic means a sound, not an idea. They
only realized this when they were doing a deep comparison
with the Greek and they found some phrases in Greek
that translated to sounds, and they noticed that these sounds
were common across these across the translation. And so it

(21:46):
was only because not only did they have examples of
the translated Greek, but they understood how this Greek was spoken,
that they could crack this code. So the key was
cultural context, was having something in common to sort of
nail languages to get other And the same is true
of like Mayan. Mayan was cracked because there's still people
speaking a variant of Mayan, and so understanding this like

(22:09):
cultural expression, the way this is spoken and used, is
absolutely essential to cracking any sort of alien language. And
so if we get a message from aliens like that
would be awesome, but it's hard to know, like even
as a message and what does it mean, Like the
wow signal is a great example, like maybe we did
get a message, we just don't know how to decode it,
or maybe we're getting messages all the time we don't

(22:30):
even recognize them, right, And so unless aliens arrive and
we can sit together and build some sort of cultural
context to establish that real communication. Mind mild, I think
it's going to be impossible.

Speaker 2 (22:42):
Yeah, you need the feedback, but I think the hieroglyphics
is a great example of example to use because it's like,
what you're doing throughout the book is an example of
where an assumption that was holding us back is invisible
to us. And it's not until we realized we had
the incorrect assumption that we can actually make progress.

Speaker 3 (23:02):
And who knows how many more assumptions there are built
in that we don't even recognize. It's not like we
have a list of assumptions we can examine them and say, yeah,
I'm pretty confident in those. The problem is that we
don't know where the edge of that box is because
we don't even know how things might be different. You
know what kind of breakfasts they eat in Alpha Centauri.

Speaker 2 (23:20):
So I want to go on to the other big
part of the communication question. Obviously, if we're going to
be sharing information about physics and the laws that govern
reality with them, our main language for doing that is math.
And so you have a question a chapter called does
one plus one equal to everywhere? This starts with a
fun contact scenario or contact hypothesis about contact that is

(23:44):
made with the star that's alive, that's kind of bioplasma,
but doesn't seem to respond to mathematical or numerical information.
And so you asked the question, is it plausible that
there could be an intelligent species that maybe even has
technology in some way we could think about it, or
at least has you know, capabilities of contact with another species,

(24:08):
but it doesn't have a concept of counting and arithmetic,
the most basic numerical thing that we think there is.
Could you explore that a bit.

Speaker 3 (24:18):
Yeah, this is where it becomes clear if you're reading
the book that the book really is about the philosophical question.
You know, is science human or is it universal? And
this really comes into focus because this is an ancient
question of philosophy of math. Right, is math something that
we've discovered or invented? Is it part of the universe
or is it a shorthand for the way that we think?

(24:40):
And it's a surprisingly difficult question. You know, on one hand,
it seems like the universe is awfully mathematical, and there
are great moments of discovery in the history of physics
where math has led us to the answer. And you know,
one of my favorites is pretty recent. It's the Higgs boson.
You know, Peter Higgs was looking at the structure of

(25:02):
quantum field theory and he noticed that these particles were
very similar, the photon and the W and the z,
but they were different. One of them had mass and
one of them had no mass. And why is that?
And anyway, how do you give masses to all the
fundamental particles without breaking this other symmetry. And he came
up with a mechanism, a mathematical mechanism. He said, you

(25:22):
know what, this whole theory is missing a piece and
clicks together only if you add this one more element.
And so this is a purely mathematical observation, saying like,
there's a mathematical structure here, and it seems like it's
missing something. Fifty years later, we go out and it's there.
The Higgs boson is there in the universe. It's real.

Speaker 2 (25:41):
It's kind of spooky.

Speaker 3 (25:42):
It's spooky, right, And there's all these great quotes from physicists,
you know, like Stephen Weinberg saying that physicists often discover
that mathematicians have been there before them, you know, and
it goes back deeper. Like Maxwell Maxwell was the same.
Maxwell was assembling the equations of electromagnetism them and he
noticed lots of beautiful symmetry, but he also noticed, Hm,

(26:03):
hold on a second, this would be more symmetrical if
we added one piece. But you can't just like add
something to the laws of physics because it's prettier. And
yet when he went out there to find if there
is an element of the universe that corresponds to this
missing piece, he found, Oh, yes, it is. It just
had been overlooked. So again the math guided him. And
to me, that's really powerfully suggestive to say, like, Wow,

(26:25):
the universe isn't just described by math. It runs on math,
like it is fundamentally mathematical. And I remember having this
moment where I personally came to believe that as an
undergrad learning like quantum mechanics and hearing about like bells
inequality and all these experiments, and I was like, Wow,
this is too accurate to be approximate, too accurate to

(26:47):
just be a description, right, this is the rules, this
is the source code of the universe. So I used
to deeply, deeply believe that. But you know, the more
you dig into the philosophy of math, the more you
realize this sits on on a bunch of assumptions, assumptions
which sound plausible, but when you dig into them, like
do we really have good arguments for them? And as

(27:09):
you say, some of them relate to like arithmetic. In
the last couple of hundreds of years, philosophers of math
have asked questions like, well, what are the basic foundations
of math? Like what are the starting rules the few
things you need to assume from which you can build
everything else? And the goal of that is not just like, hey,
let's be nerdy and figure out what the rules are,

(27:30):
but like, let's examine those assumptions and wonder like could
they have been something else? You know, the way we
might like see the fundamental equation of the universe and
ask like, is it this way? Could it have been
the other way? You learned something by seeing the fundamental
nature written down, And in the last couple hundred years
we've learned We've made a lot of progress, Like, wow,
most of mathematics is based on arithmetic, and arithmetic itself

(27:54):
is based on a few basic axioms. They're called p
and O's axioms, and those can be described in terms
of set theory, like you know this is inside that,
and a barber who shaves himselves can shave other barbers
or whatever. But at the core of it, there's a
question mark, like Godle's theorem tells us that we can't
describe everything in math using those fundamental axioms. And then

(28:16):
even if you have a bunch of fundamental axioms, there
are always going to be things that aren't captured by it.
You know, there are things in arithmetic that are true
that cannot be proven with our axioms, which tells you, like,
maybe we don't really fundamentally understand what's at the core
of mathematics.

Speaker 2 (28:36):
Is it possible to do physics without numbers? You explore
at least one scholar who's attempted to, I think, put
together a version of Newton's laws of motion or gravitation
without using numbers. You make it sound like it's kind
of difficult and painful.

Speaker 3 (28:56):
I love this book. It's not easy to read. It's
like not written for a popular audience. It's written for
like nerves of philosophy. So I'll be honest, it was
hard for me to get through it and to really
digest it. But it's a great book. It's called Science
Without Numbers. It's by heartree Field, and it's really an
effort to give an example of like do we need
mathematics or is it just really useful? And he puts

(29:19):
together an alternative theory of gravity. You know. He starts
with Newton's theory, which you can write in terms of
like a gravitational potential and a gravitational field, which is
very handy. And newton theory famously has an equation in
it and you can like calculate things with numbers, and
it's like, do we need that or is that just
really helpful? So he put together this theory of gravity

(29:40):
with no numbers. There is no gravitational field. He says,
you can't observe that directly anyway. All you see is
motion of particles. So maybe that's just like an intermediate
step that's useful to us. And then he's like, maybe
you don't need numbers at all. Maybe you don't need
to say the field has a value here, and you
know this has this the son has a mass of

(30:00):
this number. Maybe all you need are relationships. You know
this one has more mass than the other one. This
is a greater distance than that one. If he structure
in terms of relationships, he was able to recover the
not the equations of motion right because it's not like
he's not dealing with numbers, but a description of the
behavior gravitationally without using Newton's theory and without using any numbers.

(30:24):
So in the philosophy of mass, this approach is called nominalism.
Essentially says that numbers are something we made up, you know, one, two, four,
They don't exist anywhere in the world. Like where is
the number four? It's sort of hilarious philosophy question that
you could just brush off. It's like, well, it sounds
like you've been smoking too many banana peels. But you know,

(30:45):
if four exists outside of human knowledge and before us,
then like where is it? It's sort of a reasonable question, Like,
you know, if it's part of the universe, it should
have a location. Everything else that's part of the universe
has a location. So maybe it's just some thing we
constructed to help us think about stuff. And so it's
pretty hard to grow like a theory of physics without math,

(31:06):
And that's his point. His point is like look, math
is very useful, but that doesn't mean it's necessary the
way like, yes, having a car in Los Angeles is
very useful, but you could walk everywhere it would be
a huge pain. Right. It's obviously an advantage, but it
doesn't mean it's fundamental. And that opens up the door
to like, well, maybe aliens found some other way to think.

(31:27):
Maybe math reflects the way our minds work instead of
the way the universe works, and if alien minds work differently,
they might come up with something else we wouldn't call math.
Or if aliens evolved in a similar situation where they
have bodies that are easy to distinguish and so counting
makes sense, and they have like, you know, interesting economies

(31:48):
that are similar hours, they might have evolved the similar concepts.
So it comes down to essentially how much we have
in common with them evolutionarily and conceptually, whether or not
we think they might have math, but it's definitely not necessary.
And even here on Earth. I was surprised when I
was doing my research to learn that different cultures here
on Earth have different relationships with counting. You know, you

(32:10):
might look at a bunch of stuff on a desk
and I can ask you like, oh, how many things
are on the desk and you say, oh, there's four things.
But somebody who's Japanese, for example, they have different categories
of counting, and they would never group together things that
are like long and thin with things that are like
flat and short. So if you're like pencils and CDs
on a desk, they would say, oh, there's two pencils
and two CDs. You can't say that's four things because

(32:33):
they're different categories, right, And that's a hint where you
can dig in and say, like, well, when do we
group things together? Like why do I say this four things?
What is the category of a thing? Like why do
I say these things are similar enough that I can
call them a thing? And in the end, that's a
bit of an arbitrary distinction. Like if you look at
a bunch of apples on a table, I could say

(32:53):
there's ten apples, or I could say, well, there's this apple,
and there's that apple, and there's the other apple, and
they're all unique apple and so on what basis am
I saying they're all the same. That's culture, that's I'm
saying the differences are not important, and that's arbitrary and like,
I'm probably right there are about ten apples. Like I'm
not saying that every apple really is fundamentally different. But

(33:16):
when you discover that the lines you're drawing are arbitrary,
then that makes you wonder whether other people are drawing
different arbitrary lines. And again, this isn't like to say
math is useless or anything. It's just to point out
that there are cracks here, that there are assumptions we're
making that are human that might be made differently elsewhere.

Speaker 2 (33:35):
Okay, you ask some other really interesting questions along these
lines about how our thinking versus alien thinking might influence
different ways that we could relate to the universe or
that science could arise. One is you talk about differences
in perception like native sensory capabilities, and how that could
probably determine what kinds of questions and answers make sense.

(33:57):
Maybe we can come back to that, because I want
to get to your question about your chapter on do
aliens argue about planets? I found this really interesting because
I don't think I'd ever considered it this way. But
you start here with a with a contact hypothetical about
the inhabitants of a subsurface ocean on Jupiter's moon Europa,

(34:17):
who see everything in terms of Eddy's kind of swirling
swarms of matter in motion, and that that's as fundamental
to their physical view of reality as the idea of
particles and discrete objects is to us. I thought that
was really interesting, the idea that we could meet with
another speci And of course from here you build up

(34:39):
the idea that we could meet with this other specie.
We could both have science and both be able and
willing to communicate with each other, but end up finding
each other's physical metaphors for describing reality uninteresting and not
very useful. I don't think I don't think i'd ever
that had never entered my mind. So could you elaborate?

Speaker 3 (35:00):
Yeah, you know, the goal here is like identify the
assumptions that underpin our science and wonder if they could
be different. And one of my goals in writing this
book was to bring to more popular awareness that there's
like a raging philosophical debate about some of these things
that a lot of people aren't even aware of, and
one of them is this principle of emergence. You know. Essentially,

(35:24):
it asked the question, why can you make chicken soup?
Without understanding quantum gravity. Like, we don't understand the fundamental
nature of the universe for sure, we don't, you know,
like we've zoomed down to electrons and quarks and whatever.
We know that's not the final story, and we don't
know how far below that is the final story. Is
there even a final story? And yet people have been

(35:44):
like calculating how to lob cannonballs over castle walls for
a long time. And people live in the world, and
you know, we have very fancy technology that describes the
behavior of transistors and all this sorts of stuff. Why
is it possible to understand the world world without understanding
the basic rules of it. There's this sort of magic

(36:04):
trick that all of our science relies on, and it's
called emergence, and it says that the universe seems to
operate at different levels, and you can understand the universe
at sort of our level without knowing the details of
what's going on inside. Right. We've been able to do
biology and chemistry well before we were even doing particle physics. Right,

(36:24):
So it's not like everybody was waiting, y Daniel, particle
physicists tell us what is the rules so that we
can then extrapolate upwards to biology, like you could just
go ahead and do biology, you can go ahead and
do chemistry, you can do lots of classical physics. But
why does that happen? Why is that even possible? You know,
if I told you I'm going to make up a

(36:45):
bunch of random, arbitrary rules for the way the universe
works at its fundamental level, you might think, okay, well,
what are the consequences then for the macroscopic scale, you know,
And it turns out it's weird that you don't have
to know the microscopic to understand the macroscopic. And that's
the thing that makes me wonder if we don't know
why that works. And this is a deep question in philosophy,

(37:06):
why does simplicity emerge from complexity and chaos? Then how
do we know we're not imposing it on the universe?
How do we know there's not a cultural bias where
we're like, well, there's a seeding mass of chaos out
there in the universe, and we're selecting the things that
are interesting to us because they're relevant to us and
they come out of the way we live, and we're

(37:28):
expressing the universe in terms of those things. And so
I chose this question of planets because talking to a
mathematician friend of mine early on in his book, he
was like, yeah, well, but I mean, aliens are going
to agree with us, but like there are planets and
stars and galaxies and we have some scientific cultural touch points.
And I was like, well, I don't know, maybe what
if they didn't evolve on a planet so they don't

(37:50):
see like rocks through space as fundamental. I mean, one
way to understand this is like, think about how we
describe the Solar System. Is it to scale? It never is.
Whenever you see a description of the Solar System, it
takes the planets and it zooms them way out of proportion.
Somebody looking at that would be like, whoa dude, you

(38:11):
kind of biased towards planets here, Like, really, planets are
irrelevant dust compared to the Sun. So if you're an
alien species that evolves like in a solar atmosphere, you're
going to think it's awfully weird that we think about
solar systems the way that we do, where planets are
front and center. And as I make the argument in
the book, we don't even have a good definition of

(38:32):
what a planet is. I mean, we've been arguing about
it for decades and the definition we have is pretty absurd.
And it's the reason, like for all this kerfuffle about Pluto,
it's because we wanted to protect this category. We wanted
to have something special that made us feel important. And
anytime we've done that in the history of science, you know,
like the Earth, this is the center of the universe,

(38:52):
the Earth is the center of the Solar System. It's
always let us down the wrong path. And so it's
hard to imagine aliens who don't understand planets and don't
think about the universe in terms of rocks orbiting stars.
But if they evolve in subsurface oceans, maybe they just
think about, you know, little chaotic vortices and they build

(39:13):
up their explanation in the universe from that. So that's
what this chapter is about. And I had a lot
of fun talking to philosophers about emergence, and it realized
that I had a lot of assumptions about the way
emergence works. Like, for example, I assumed that the universe
has a fundamental level, that there is some firmament where
the rules are set and everything emerges from that, and

(39:35):
maybe we don't know exactly how, and it's complicated the
way that like hurricanes are complicated, but we think they
follow rules, but that's not necessarily true. Like what if
there is no firmament. What if it's just like layers
of emergence all the way down, or what if you know,
they don't follow from below, Maybe things don't bubble upwards.
Maybe every layer has its own set of laws that

(39:57):
are somehow independent. There's a lot of basic philosophical assumptions
you make when you take a sort of particle physics
point of view there.

Speaker 2 (40:14):
That gets into your chapter also about the idea that
maybe there are no underlying laws of physics, but also
just at the base level of you know, the objects
we deal with when we're talking about planets and particles.
There was a great example in this chapter where you're
trying to illuminate the different zoom settings. I think a
lot of people will be familiar with the idea that, yeah,

(40:36):
chemistry maybe is an approximation and you can get more
exact if you go down into particle physics, and and
of course you know hire biology is more of an approximation.
It's based on emergence. But I think a lot of
people would have that in their head, but think, well,
when you get down to you know, particles, that's the
base level. But I love the example you use in
the book of the charge of the electron and how actually,

(40:59):
while we have good approximation for how that works, that
still relies on zoom settings. Could you explain that example.

Speaker 3 (41:07):
Yeah, I wanted to dig into this because I think
a lot of people think about it the way you
just described that. They imagine that eventually you can get
down to the fundamental truth, right And like number one,
we don't know if there is and the zoomiest bit
that we have so far is still kind of a mess.
Like I make fun of astronomers having a silly definition
of planet, but like definition of a particle is much

(41:27):
more of a mess philosophically. You get ten particle theorists
in a room and you ask them what is a particle?
You're gonna get ten answers, Like it's crazy. Like this
concept is historical, it's intuitive for us. It comes out
of our need to describe the universe in terms of
like little bits of stuff, and in many ways I
think it's holding us back. You know, we have a

(41:48):
glimpse now in quantum field theory that things work differently,
but we're still sort of like clinging to this idea anyway.
The current idea of a particle is hard to describe
because particles are by themselves. Like you think of an
electron as a tiny dot with a negative charge on it. Cool,
little ball, Yeah, people think a little ball, right, And

(42:09):
there it is. There's your intuition, your classical intuition. I
live in the universe with rocks and little bits of stuff,
and so everything is made out of little bits of stuff, right.
It's the way you might laugh at the ancient Greeks,
and we're still doing it. But you think of the electron,
even if you like think, well, it's not a ball
of stuff, it's a point, right, and it's got a
negative sign on it. And where does that negative sign

(42:29):
come from? Well, we measure it in experiments, right. We
know the charge of the electron. We have the famous
oil drop experiment that told us the mass to charge ratio,
et cetera. But is that the charge of the electron itself?
Because the electron, because it has a charge, is always
interacting with the electromagnetic field. It makes a field and
as it moves that field ripples, and so the right

(42:52):
way to describe an electron either is in terms of
a field around it, or equivalently as a cloud of
virtual photons. Right, Photons are ripples in the electromagnetic field,
and so from the particle point of view, you have
the electron. It's surrounded by this cloud of virtual photons,
and those virtual photons change the charge that you measure.
So when you're measuring the charge of the electron, you're

(43:13):
not measuring the charge of the pure bear electron. You're
measuring the charge of the electron plus this cloud of photons.
Because photons can fluctuate into like electrons and positrons, you
have this cloud of charged particles, and say electrons charge
polarizes that cloud, and depending on how far into that
cloud you go, you get a different answer for what

(43:34):
is the charge that we measure. So really far away
from the cloud you get the charge that we know
in loud that Ben Franklin discovered and that we measured
one hundred years ago. But if you start to probe
into that cloud, then you're not seeing as much of
those photons. You're getting through it closer to the bare electron,
closer to the real truth of the electrons charge, and
you get a more negative number. And the deeper you

(43:57):
probe in towards that cloud, the more or you're not
being affected by those particles, the more negative that number gets.
And if you extrapolate, what would it be like if
you went all the way through the clouds, you went
all the way to the electron. What number would you
measure for the charge of the electron? The answer is
negative infinity? Like what? This is another example in physics

(44:19):
where you get a nonsense answer that tells you that,
like your theory has been pushed beyond its region of applicability. Right,
it doesn't make sense. We're not saying the electron really
does have a negative charge. We're saying the concept of
the electron on its own with the charge that is
not an appropriate way to think about what's happening. Really,

(44:40):
electrons are always tied together with photons. We're making this
arbitrary dotted line between the electrons and the photons because
we like to think of it that way, But fundamentally,
these two are so deeply interwoven that it doesn't make
sense to imagine the charge of the electron by itself.
So even this concept of a particle, like the fundamental
base this of all of our particle physics, and we

(45:01):
think the universe and even if the electron isn't, we
think that our particles within it. Right, this basic unit
of our imagination is something that's not really an appropriate
description of the universe. And so that to me smells
of humanity, of cultural choices, of being linked to our intuition,
the preference, the way that we like to hear the answers,

(45:24):
and so the language that we express ourselves in. And
I wonder if aliens argue about particles and argue about planets,
and it would be amazing. It'd be amazing if they didn't,
if they came with a completely different way of expressing
and explaining the universe, that would be mind blowing. That's
my real fantasy.

Speaker 2 (45:45):
Well, that actually does tie into a later chapter, the
one where you're talking about alternative alien science. Could there
be completely different theories of everything, complete theories of physics
that both correctly predict the behavior of all matter, energy,
and space time, and yet they're different theories? Is that

(46:07):
actually possible? Are two different theories that always make the
exact same predictions actually equivalent?

Speaker 3 (46:14):
Yeah, so this is a great example, like this is
a question philosophers have been debating for decades and decades
that's basically unknown in physics. Like I think most physicists
and most people out there imagine if you find a
theory that works and is simple and it's basic, like
say string theory, figures it out and they have one

(46:34):
equation and it describes everything and it predicts every experiment
and it all works, then people are like, okay, well
you're done right, Like that's it. But there's an assumption
there that there's a unique description, that there's only one description,
one way to answer this question, And it actually makes
a lot more sense to imagine that there might be
multiple descriptions. I mean, like, consider any time you have data,

(46:58):
you measure something, you have data points, and then you
try to describe it, describe it by like drawing a
line through it. Maybe it's a straight line, maybe it's
a wiggly line. Maybe you have some model you're fitting
to your data. That model is describing things between your
data points that you have not observed. And even if
you take infinite amounts of data, there will always be
multiple models that fit the data. So it actually kind

(47:20):
of makes sense to imagine you could have multiple ways
to describe the same universe, and I think this conflicts
with your natural intuition. They're like, yeah, but there's a
true answer. You know, the universe runs some way and
we just have to figure it out. And maybe we're right,
or maybe the aliens are right, and maybe our theory
of quantum fields is wrong and maybe their theory of

(47:41):
quantum fields is right or whatever. But there is a truth.
And that's a philosophical assumption saying that there's a single
objective truth that we could discover and it's unique. How
do you know you don't know. That's exactly the kind
of philosophical assumption I want to sort of reveal in
this book, saying that we don't. I'm not saying that

(48:01):
there isn't, but I'm saying that we can't be sure.
And you know, there's lots of arguments in philosophy that
say that there very well could be, and there's lots
of great historical examples. You know, the history of our
physics is the history of overthrowing one way of thinking
about the universe for another one. You know, when Einstein

(48:23):
upgraded on understanding of gravity, didn't just give us better
equations that were more accurate. He completely revised the story
of what's happening. You know, it's not masses pulling on
each other. It's space itself is bending and curving, and
gravity is not even a force. So there is history
of overthrowing our ideas, which suggests that there are other

(48:46):
ideas out there which could better or at least equivalently
describe the universe that we see, that we could conceive
of right now. If you are a super genius, you
could sit down and come up with another way to
describe gravity or quantity, fields or whatever that's equivalent or superior.
And so it's certainly possible to have multiple theories. And

(49:09):
so in the in the literature, they argue about this,
and there's a whole group of people like this is
Guy Norton who says that any alternative theory is quote,
merely the same theory dressed in different clothes. Right that
as you say, look, okay, maybe you have fields and
we have shmields, but they must be equivalent because if
they're doing the same thing, right, they're making the same predictions,

(49:31):
how can they really be different? And you know, we
don't know the answer to that. Because nobody has an
alternative like this is theoretical. Philosophers say it should be possible,
and other philosophers say, like, all right, show us, you
know what are you talking about? Where is this alternative? Right?
And we don't have that. So all we can do

(49:51):
is look at our history, and we have some fascinating
examples there, like you know, Newtonian mechanics was supplanted by
the Rongen mechanics and Hamiltonian mechanics, which is a different
way to think about like how things move. If you
want to calculate, you know, how does the ball move
with the parabola, you can use Newtonian mechanics and we
do that. You know, F equals MA and that works.

(50:13):
But as soon as it gets complicated, you have your
ball and a string, and the string is being held
by a squirrel and the squirrels on a roller coaster,
it's way too hard to use Newton's laws, like it
just becomes unsolvable. So these clever guys, Lagrange and Hamilton
came up with more effective mechanics that rely essentially on
energy as the fundamental principle, and you can derive Newton's

(50:34):
laws from them, and Lagrange and mechanics and Hamiltonia mechanics
are very similar, but they're all so different, and you
can use both of them to describe these things. And
for like more than one hundred years, people have been
arguing about are these two theories just the same dressed
in different clothes or are they fundamentally different? And last
ten years or twenty years or so, they've been digging into, like, well,

(50:57):
what does it mean to be different? You know, this
is the way philosophy makes progress. They're like, well, what
is the word? Meaning of the word is mean anyway?
So it gets pretty nerdy and abstract. But fundamentally, we
don't know. We don't know if it's possible to have
multiple theories that describe the universe equivalently and are fundamentally
categorically different that they tell different conceptual stories, or if

(51:21):
both being effective means that they fundamentally have to be
telling the same story. We just don't know, And we
have examples on the other side, you know, like quantum mechanics.
We had matrix equations and we had wave equations. You know,
Schrodinger and Heisenberg and von Neumann showed okay, guys, these
are actually the same thing. You know, just you have
different operators and different kinds of math, and they seem

(51:42):
pretty different, but actually they are the same, which is
kind of hilarious because Schortinger and Heisenberg famously sort of
hated each other and really didn't like the other's approached, Like, ough,
I find it gross, but yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's some
German dissing in the in the academic literature which is
pretty fun to read. But they are fundamentally the same.

(52:03):
So you can show that's not two theories, right, that
is just one theory expressed in different clothing. So that
would be fascinating. Right when the aliens show up with
their theory, it might be very different and we might
be able to show that it's essentially the same, or
we might discover, wow, this is a very different story
about what's happening in the universe. It really is a
different way to explain things that can't be mapped to ours.

(52:28):
And what would that mean? You know, what would that
mean if the universe has multiple correct descriptions, it means
something about the nature of truth, right, but what is
really happening? If there is anything that you can say
is really happening.

Speaker 2 (52:55):
So I think one reason people are tempted to think
that aliens would have science and it would be similar
to us, similar to our science, is because when we,
at least I have this experience, I think a lot
of people do. When you look back on scientific history,
you somehow get this feeling that it's kind of faded,

(53:17):
that it's like on track, maybe because it's not, because
it feels like different than like artistic you know, creations
where it's like the scientific discoveries and history are bound
by nature, and so because they're discovering things about nature,
just kind of feels inevitable that it would have developed
in the.

Speaker 3 (53:37):
Way that it did.

Speaker 2 (53:38):
Could you talk about some reasons for thinking that actually
the history of human science is somewhat contingent, and how
that could undermine our belief that aliens would develop science
along the same tracks.

Speaker 3 (53:52):
Yeah, this is really fun. I got to dig into
a lot of the history here, and I agree with you.
I used to think of the history of science as inevitable.
I plead civilization for example, and you know you have
to develop this, and then gunpowdern and then you can
build this, and it feels sort of like a natural progression.
But you know, there's a lot of moments in the
history of science that were random, that were accidental, where

(54:13):
we discovered something that we could have discovered much earlier,
and it could have totally changed the path of our science.
And this is one of the reasons I wrote the
book in the structure I did with this Drake equation
structure because it let me make some assumptions, Like at
this point in the book, I'm saying, all right, let's
push aside all of the philosophical questions. Let's assume aliens
do science, they use math, they ask the same questions,

(54:33):
they're interested in the same stuff as us. Even then,
how similar or different might their science be? Or like,
take aliens out of the equation, imagine running the earth
a million times, you know, and even start from like
humans have formed one hundred thousand years ago, When do
they become technological? How long does that take? What does
that civilization look like? What science do they develop? Are

(54:55):
we typically late or early compared to that population? Love
to know the answer to that question, you know, what
is the path of science in all of those different earths?
And so we can't know that, but we do have
some glimmers, you know. I was able to like dig
into ancient human civilizations Mayans and Chinese and the Greeks

(55:17):
before they really talk to each other. It's sort of
like a little mini experiment to compare proto scientific development
to see how similar it was. But actually, before we gether,
you asked about like more recent developments. One of my
favorites is the discovery of X rays, which was you know,
essentially just accidental. Guy left a source on top of
a photographic sheet, came back over the weekend, found this thing,

(55:40):
He wrote it up, published it the next day, beat
some English guy by.

Speaker 2 (55:46):
I got his wife to stick her hand in front
of it.

Speaker 3 (55:49):
Exactly, and you know, made this discovery. And all the
tools were there, like people have been using uranium for
a long time, and we had photography for a while,
so you could have discovered that much much earlier. It
was really just an accident. And so I like to imagine, well,
what if we had what if we had made that
discovery decades or centuries earlier, because that discovery is what

(56:11):
kicked off like the Curees and their analysis of radiation,
and then you know Rutherford and his analysis of the
nucleus and like basically quantum mechanics right, that was the
moment that kicked off everything that led to quantum mechanics.
What if that had happened one hundred years earlier. What
if little Einstein was taught quantum mechanics in the crib,

(56:33):
then when he was developing his theory of general relativity,
would he have come up with some quantum version. I mean,
it's it's just one example, but it shows you how
randomness affects the development of our science and it could
have taken us on different paths. And so the fact
that we're stuck right now unifying quantum mechanics and gravity

(56:54):
and that even Einstein wasn't able to do it, maybe
it's because we started too late with quantu caad And
if quantum mechanics was more intuitive to the smarty pants
in the last one hundred years, maybe we would have
made more progress. Or maybe there's some other crazy and
kind of obvious discovery we haven't made yet and on
all the other earths they have and so they're like

(57:16):
way far ahead of us because we just haven't like
stumbled across XYZ, you know. Or maybe we're very far
ahead and most earths they're still using stone tools. Who knows,
but It would certainly affect what it's like to talk
to aliens. You know, are they on the same single
path that we are on? Are there multiple paths up

(57:36):
this sort of mountain to figure out the nature of
the universe? And where did their path diverge? You know,
did they start totally differently from us or do they
just like randomly discover things in a different order. Really
really fascinating to learn that, and so that's why I
dug into the sort of ancient history. You know, we're
the Mayans being mathematical. If the Mayans, for example, had

(57:59):
not been devastated by the Spanish, what would their mathematics
and science be like right now? That would be fascinating
to know. It's such a tragedy. You know, they might
have a very different way to think about the universe
and to express it. They certainly were on the road
to doing that when the Europeans got there. Their predictions
for like motions of stars and moons were more accurate

(58:21):
than the European predictions. So you know, we certainly lost
a whole thread there.

Speaker 2 (58:27):
Okay, if your game for this, here's the part where
I would like you to speculate. I want you to
voice your hunches, if you have a guess or a
suspicion about what is most likely the limiting factor in
the original Drake equation, like which of those variables you
know may be multiple, but which of them is most

(58:48):
likely to be near zero and is the reason we're
not hearing from anybody? And then secondly, what do you
think is most likely to be the filter preventing the
alien physics conference?

Speaker 3 (59:02):
Yeah, my hunch, again not scientifically, is that there's life
everywhere in the universe, that it's all over. You know
that maybe the fraction of planets that have life is small,
but it can't be that small. You know, it doesn't
seem like we're that special. So I think there's probably
at least microbial life everywhere. How often do you get

(59:24):
like complex multicellular life, I don't know. But still my
hunch is that the denominator is big enough to tolerate
a small fraction and that the final result is still
going to be large. So I'm going to imagine that
the universe is filled with technological aliens, and you know,
we haven't heard from them because we don't understand their signals,
or because you know, time and space have prevented them

(59:47):
from coming here or communicating with us. So I think that,
you know, we're starting from a good number. I think
that when they do arrive, that we are going to
be shocked by how human are so sciences. I mean,
I think I persuaded myself when I was writing this
book that there's a lot of assumptions we're making that
you know, they're not going to have coffee and croissants

(01:00:09):
for breakfast. They're going to be so much weirder than
we imagine, because even on Earth, life is always weirder
than we imagine, always discovering super weird, gunky stuff, and
so it's sort of it's really just hubris to imagine
that our way of thinking and our way of doing
things is the only way, is the best way to me.

(01:00:31):
It's equivalent to like geocentrism, you know, to put ourselves
at the center of the intellectual universe and say this
is the only way. And I'm looking forward to that.
I want my mind blown. I want it to be
bizarre and difficult. I wanted to take decades to understand
what they're even talking about and how they think about things,
because then we're going to learn something about ourselves, not

(01:00:54):
just the aliens. We're going to learn about what's unusual
about us. Where do we stand? Is weird about being human?
And it's going to help define what it means to
be human and to be a human scientist. This is
how we think about things, This is how we ask
about things. These are kind of answers that we find
satisfying and that we accept and don't ask more questions about.
And these are the things that drive us and make

(01:01:16):
us curious. You know, so I think, I hope, I
guess I have a hunch, and I hope that aliens
do science in a much weirder way than anybody imagines
that even is imagined in this book, right. I don't
claim that what we've described in this book spans the
whole space of ideas. I just want to give people
a flavor that there are many ideas out there that
we haven't even imagined because we might not have the

(01:01:39):
capacity to think outside of our little box.

Speaker 2 (01:01:43):
The book is called Do Aliens Speak Physics? Daniel Whitson,
thank you so much for joining us today.

Speaker 3 (01:01:48):
Thank you very much, super fun and conversation. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:01:54):
All right, so much appreciation to Daniel Whitson, for joining
us today. The book Do As Speak Physics is slated
for release on November fourth, twenty twenty five, but you
can pre order your copy now. And if you want
to check out Daniel's podcast, it is called Daniel and
Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. If you're new to the show, Stuff

(01:02:16):
to Blow Your Mind is a science and culture podcast
with core episodes publishing on Tuesdays and Thursdays of every week.
Usually I'm joined by my regular co host, Robert Lamb
for those, and then also on Fridays we do a
different kind of show called Weird House Cinema, which is
just about weird movies.

Speaker 3 (01:02:34):
They can be.

Speaker 2 (01:02:35):
Old, new, good, bad, well known, or obscure. The only
real criterion is they've got to be weird, So we
do that on Fridays. On Wednesdays we usually have a
short form episode. On Saturdays and Mondays we feature older
episodes of the shows. You'll get a rerun of a
core episode from the Vault on Saturdays and a Weird
House Cinema rewind on Mondays.

Speaker 3 (01:02:58):
Let's see.

Speaker 2 (01:02:59):
If you would like to follow us on social media,
you can find us there. We're on I think most
of the major places, some we're called something like blow
the Mind or stuff to Blow your Mind, and I
guess that does it. So huge thanks as always to
our excellent audio producer JJ Posway, and today big thanks
again to Daniel Whitson for joining us. If you would

(01:03:22):
like to get in touch with us with feedback on
this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for
the future, or just to say hello, you can email
us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:03:42):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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