From the Vault: 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," now out whereever you get your books.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb. It is Saturday, so we have
a vault episode for you. This one is going to
be an interview that Joe conducted with a friend of
the show, Daniel Whitson, titled Do Alien Speak Physics? And
of course this concern is Whitson's new book, Do Alien

(00:26):
Speak Physics out now wherever you get your books. So
without further ado, let's jump right into this interview episode.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
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 book,
Do Aliens Speak Physics. Daniel shared an advance copy of

(01:05):
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

(01:26):
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

(01:46):
Andy Warner. And now onto my conversation with Daniel Daniel Whitson,
Welcome back to the show.

Speaker 4 (01:56):
Thanks so much for having me on. Excited to talk
to you again.

Speaker 3 (02:00):
So the book is Do Aliens Speak Physics? And I
have really really been enjoying this book. I plan 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

(02:21):
the skimming of the last two or three.

Speaker 4 (02:23):
Maybe you should have read the book to you toddler
to help put them to sleep.

Speaker 3 (02:27):
Maybe I think she would really like the illustrations. Actually,
but the problem is I had digital versions, 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 exciting. But
I guess we should start with the elevator pitch. What
is the central question you're exploring in this book?

Speaker 4 (02:50):
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

(03:12):
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

(03:34):
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 3 (03:42):
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 know, 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,

(04:05):
one thing 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

(04:29):
explore the 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

(04:50):
alien physics conference question.

Speaker 4 (04:52):
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

(05:15):
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

(05:36):
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

(05:57):
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

(06:18):
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 might 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

(06:40):
a 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 stymied by your
inability to make progress 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 hung's of billions of galaxies. So

(07:01):
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 are,

(07:25):
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

(07:45):
are zero, we're screwed. And we don't know 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 qu question how many alien civilizations are
there out there that we can talk science with? And

(08:06):
so to do that we broke it into several questions.
We said, well, what fraction of them do science? You know,
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

(08:26):
a mental mind meld about these things? Do they ask
the same kind of questions that we ask?

Speaker 1 (08:33):
Are?

Speaker 4 (08:33):
Are 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 all 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 3 (08:54):
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

(09:19):
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 able 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

(09:43):
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 with out science.

Speaker 4 (10:01):
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 understood that,
you know, science has a lot of humanity in it,
the structure, the institutions, the process, and it's fairly recent.

(10:25):
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 intermediate step 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 that I wanted to make the strongest argument I
could that maybe they aren't, because you know, deeply, because

(10:48):
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.

Speaker 3 (11:01):
So I'm trying to break out of it.

Speaker 4 (11:03):
And you know, the book is an exercise essentially and
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, you know,

(11:26):
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 making incredible

(11:46):
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 planet where

(12:10):
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, but also

(12:31):
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 ballasts to go down. They're like little submarines essentially,
but they learned 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

(12:53):
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

(13:13):
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

(13:34):
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

(13:55):
it to us because they're like, what do you mean? Like,
here's how you do it? What do you mean why?

Speaker 3 (13:59):
How? 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

(14:22):
off of that is, do you think the desire to
understand why, to ask the question why is a core
feature of intelligence 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

(14:44):
don't know. I suspect that the question why has got
to be pretty 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.
But I don't know. I could definitely be missing things there.

(15:06):
They are contingencies I'm not seeing.

Speaker 4 (15:09):
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 gonna
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

(15:33):
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.

(15:56):
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,

(16:16):
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
sweet things for breakfast. You know, the first time I
went traveling and I was like, hmm, wow, people have

(16:39):
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 gonna blow our

(17:01):
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 just thinking about stuff.

(17:23):
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. They're like, yeah,
we used to do it that way, but then we
came up with this other trick that's so much better.
I can't believe you guys are still doing experiments or whatever.

(17:46):
And so it could be that they don't do science
because they've left it behind for something even more powerful.

Speaker 3 (18:02):
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.

(18:24):
But before we look at math, I want to look
at difficulties in basic just language communication. And you draw
the analogy with difficulties 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 4 (18:43):
Yeah, this is fun because you know, we haven't met
aliens if we don't know what amiling 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 little alien to
us are ancient human civilizations. So I thought, let's dig

(19:04):
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

(19:24):
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, the same environment.
They have lots and they left us lots of examples,
but in same cases, we still have not decoded their writing. Like, yes,
we decoded ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, there's an important caveat in

(19:46):
that story, but we have not, for example, decoded Etruscan writing.
And the Etruscans 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 in undecipherable. It's incredible to me. It
tells me that like the barrier to accessing another intelligence,

(20:07):
even one hosted on the 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

(20:29):
you know, 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. That it's essentially impossible to decode just

(20:54):
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 is this famous story
the Rosetta Stone. We had hieroglyphics, nobody could decode them.
Then we found this cheat sheet, right, it's got Greek

(21:16):
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,
dot 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 they had examples of decoded text in

(21:37):
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 are look like birds are
mean birds someway. The ones that look like water mean
water some way, but they're not. Egyptian hieroglyphics turn out

(21:58):
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

(22:18):
it 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, just having something in common to
sort of nail languages together. 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

(22:42):
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 if
it even is a message and what does it mean?
Like the wow signal is a great example, like maybe
we did get a message, don't know how to decode it,
or maybe we're getting messages all the time, we don't

(23:03):
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 3 (23:15):
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 4 (23:34):
Yeah, and who knows how many more assumptions there are
built and 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 3 (23:53):
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 physic 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

(24:17):
made with a 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,

(24:40):
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 4 (24:50):
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?

(25:13):
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

(25:34):
quantum field theory and he noticed that these particles were
very similar to 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

(25:54):
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 3 (26:14):
That's kind of spooky.

Speaker 4 (26:15):
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. Maxwell was assembling
the equations of electromagnetism and he noticed lots of beautiful symmetry,
but he also noticed, hmm, hold on a second, this

(26:37):
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.

Speaker 3 (26:51):
Yes, it is.

Speaker 4 (26:52):
It just had been overlooked. So again the math guided him.
And to me, that's really powerfully suggestive to say, like, wow,
the universe isn't 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

(27:13):
inequality and all these experiments, and I was like, Wow,
this is too accurate to be approximate, too accurate to
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 a bunch of assumptions, assumptions which

(27:35):
sound plausible, but when you dig into them, like do
we really have good arguments for them? And as 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.

(27:58):
And the goal of that is it's not just like, hey,
let's be nerdy and figure out what the rules are,
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 it? Could it have
been the other way? You learned something by seeing the
fundamental nature written down, And in the last couple hundred

(28:19):
years we've learned We've made a lot of progress, Like wow.
Most of mathematics is based on arithmetic, and arithmetic itself
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 themselves can shave other barbers
or whatever. But at the core of it, there's a

(28:42):
question mark, like Godal's theorem tells us that we can't
describe everything in math using those fundamental axioms. And then
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 with our axioms, which tells you like,

(29:03):
maybe we don't really fundamentally understand what's at the core
of mathematics.

Speaker 3 (29:09):
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 4 (29:28):
I love this book. It's not easy to read. It's
like not written for a popular audience. It's written for
like nerds 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

(29:51):
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 gravitational field, which is very handy.
And newton theory famously has an equation in it and
you can like calculate things with numbers, and he's like,
do we need that or is that just really helpful?
So he put together this theory of gravity with no numbers,

(30:13):
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 this number. Maybe

(30:34):
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 equationance 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

(30:55):
theory and without using any numbers. 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 a sort of a hilarious philosophy
question that you could just brush off. It's like, well,

(31:15):
it sounds like you've been smoking too many banana peels.
But you know, 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 something we constructed to help us think about stuff.

(31:36):
And so it's pretty hard to growck like a theory
of physics without math, 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

(31:56):
opens up the door to like, well, maybe aliens found
some other way to think. 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

(32:19):
they have like you know, interesting economies 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

(32:40):
Earth have different relationships with counting. You know, you 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 like pencils CDs on a desk,

(33:01):
they would say, oh, there's two pencils and two CDs.
You can't say that's four things because 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,

(33:21):
that's a bit of an arbitrary distinction. Like if you
look at a bunch of apples on a table, I
could say 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 apples 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.

(33:41):
And like, I'm probably right there are ten apples, Like
I'm not saying every apple really is fundamentally different. But
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
matth is useless or anything. It's just to point out

(34:02):
that there are cracks here, that there are assumptions we're
making that are human that might be made differently elsewhere.

Speaker 3 (34:08):
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.

(34:29):
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 ever considered it this way. But
you start here with a contact hypothetical about the inhabitants
of a subsurface ocean on Jupiter's moon Europa, who see

(34:50):
everything in terms of eddy is 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
spec And of course, from here you build up the

(35:12):
idea that we could meet with this other speci 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 on that?

Speaker 4 (35:33):
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,

(35:56):
essentially asked the question, why can you make chicken soup
with out 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

(36:16):
like calculating how to lob cannon balls 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 without understanding
the basic rules of it. There's this sort of magic

(36:37):
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,

(36:57):
So it's not like everybody was waiting. I know, 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

(37:18):
bunch of random, arbitrary rules for the way the universe
works at it a 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

(37:38):
philosophy why does simplicity emerge from you know, 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,

(37:59):
and they come out of the way we live, and
we're expressing the universe in terms.

Speaker 3 (38:03):
Of those things.

Speaker 4 (38:05):
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 about like there are planets
and stars and galaxies. I'm gonna 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 see like rocks through space as fundamental. I mean,

(38:27):
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're kind of biased towards planets here, Like, really, planets
are irrelevant dust compared to the Sun. So if you're

(38:51):
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 send. And as I make the argument
in the book, we don't even have a good definition
of 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

(39:12):
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 is the center of the universe,
the Earth is the center of the Solar system, it's
always led us down the wrong path. And so it's
hard to imagine aliens who don't understand planets and don't

(39:35):
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
up their explanation of 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 realized that
I had a lot of assumptions about the way emergence works. Like,

(39:57):
for example, I assumed that the universe has fundamental level,
that there is some firmament where the rules are set
and everything emerges from that, and 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.

(40:17):
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 are somehow independent.
There's a lot of basic philosophical assumptions you make when
you take a sort of particle physics point of view.

Speaker 3 (40:36):
There 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.

(41:00):
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,
chemistry maybe is an approximation and you can get more
exact if you go down into particle physics. 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

(41:22):
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, while
we have a good approximation for how that works, that
still relies on zoom settings. Could you explain that example.

Speaker 4 (41:40):
Yeah, I wanted to dig into this because I think
a lot of people think about 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 zoomi ist bit
that we have so far is still kind of a myth.
Like I make fun of astronomers having a silly definition
of planet, but like definition of a particle is much
much more of a mess philosophically, you get ten particle

(42:02):
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 glimpse now in quantum field theory that things

(42:23):
work differently, but we're still sort of like clinging to
this idea.

Speaker 3 (42:27):
Anyway.

Speaker 4 (42:27):
The current idea of a particle is hard to describe
because particles are never 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 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

(42:49):
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.

Speaker 3 (42:58):
Of stuff.

Speaker 4 (42:58):
It's a point, right, and it's got negative sign on it.
And where does that negative sign 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

(43:19):
electromagnetic field. It makes a field and as it moves,
that field ripples, and so the right way to describe
an electron either as in terms of a field around it,
or equivalently as a cloud of virtual photons. Right, Photons
are ripples and 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

(43:41):
change the charge that you measure. So when you're measuring
the charge of the electron, you're not measuring the charge
of the pure, bare 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,

(44:02):
And depending on how far into that cloud you go,
you get a different answer for what 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

(44:24):
real truth of the electrons charge, and you get a
more negative number. And the deeper you probe intowards that cloud,
the more 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 cloud, you went all the way to to
the electron, what number would you measure for the charge
of the electron? The answer is negative infinity?

Speaker 3 (44:48):
Like what.

Speaker 4 (44:51):
This is another example in physics where you get a
nonsense answer that tells you that, like your theory has
been pushed beyond its region of applicability. Right, it makes 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

(45:11):
think about what's happening. Really, 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 basis of all of our

(45:33):
particle physics, and we 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

(45:56):
like to hear the answers, 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 3 (46:17):
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

(46:40):
actually possible? Are two different theories that always make the
exact same predictions actually equivalent?

Speaker 4 (46:47):
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 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 equation and it describes everything and it predicts every

(47:09):
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 is 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 anytime

(47:29):
you have data. You measure something, you have a few
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 all 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

(47:51):
the data. So it actually kind of makes sense to imagine, hm,
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

(48:12):
maybe their theory of 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 know,
you don't know. That's exactly the kind of philosophical assumption
I want to sort of reveal in this book, And
I'm not saying that we don't. I'm not saying that

(48:34):
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

(48:56):
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 this
history of overthrowing our ideas which suggests that there are

(49:18):
other 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 quantum fields or whatever that's equivalent
or superior. And so it's certainly possible to have multiple

(49:40):
theories and so in the literature they argue about this,
and there's a whole group of people like this is
skuy Norton who says that any alternative theory is quote
merely the same theory dressed in different clothes.

Speaker 3 (49:53):
Right that as you.

Speaker 4 (49:54):
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, if they're making the same predictions, 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,

(50:14):
and other philosophers say, like, all right, show us you
know what are you talking about. Where is this alternative?

Speaker 3 (50:20):
Right?

Speaker 4 (50:22):
And we don't have that. So all we can do
is look at our history, and we have some fascinating
examples there, like you know, Newtonian mechanics was supplanted by
Lagrangeen 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.

(50:44):
You know, f equals MA, and that works. But as
soon as it gets complicated, you have your ball and
a string, and a 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
with more effective mechanics that rely essentially on energy as

(51:04):
the fundamental principle, and you can derive Newton's laws from them.
And lagrange And mechanics and Hamiltonian 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 the last ten years

(51:27):
or twenty years or so they've been digging into, like, well,
what does it mean to be different? You know, this
is the way philosophy makes progress. They're like, well, what
is the meaning of the word is mean?

Speaker 3 (51:37):
Anyway?

Speaker 4 (51:38):
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
both being effective means that they fundamentally have to be
telling the same story. We just don't know. And we

(51:59):
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
pretty different, but actually they are the same, which is
kind of hilarious because Schortinger and Heisenberg famously sort of

(52:21):
hated each other and really didn't like the other's approached, Like, oh,
I find it gross.

Speaker 2 (52:26):
But.

Speaker 4 (52:28):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's some German dissing the in the
academic literature which is pretty fun to read. But they
are fundamentally the same. 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

(52:49):
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 that
can't be mapped to ours. 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,

(53:11):
But what is really happening? If there is anything you
can say is really happening.

Speaker 3 (53:28):
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,

(53:50):
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 they're they are 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 way that it did. Could

(54:11):
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 4 (54:24):
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 played civilization, for example, and you know, you have
to develop this, and then gunpowdern 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 we

(54:46):
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 and say, 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,

(55:06):
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

(55:28):
we typically late or early compared to that population? Boy,
I would 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 before they really talk to each other.

(55:51):
It's sort of like a little mini experiment to compare
proto scientific development to see how similar it was.

Speaker 3 (55:59):
But actually where we together?

Speaker 4 (56:00):
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,
He wrote it up, published it the next day. Beat
some English guy by I.

Speaker 3 (56:19):
Got his wife to stick her hand in front of it.

Speaker 4 (56:22):
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

(56:44):
kicked off like the Cures 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,

(57:05):
then when he was developing his theory of general relativity,
would he have come up with some quantum version. I mean,
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 and

(57:27):
that even Einstein wasn't able to do it, maybe it's
because we started too late with quantum mechanics, 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 way

(57:49):
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
this sort of mountain to figure out the nature of

(58:11):
the universe? And where did their path diverge? You know,
did they start totally differently from us or did 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, were
the Mayans being mathematical? If the Mayans, for example, had

(58:32):
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

(58:54):
than the European predictions. So you know, we certainly lost
a whole thread there.

Speaker 3 (59:00):
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,
maybe multiple, but which of them is most likely to

(59:22):
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 4 (59:35):
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

(59:57):
like complex multicellular life, know, But I 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

(01:00:20):
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 science is. 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

(01:00:41):
for breakfast. They're going to be so much weirder than
we imagine. Because even on Earth, life is always weirder
than we imagine. We're always discovering super weird, gunky stuff,
and so it's sort of it's really just hubris to
imagine that our way way of thinking and our way
of doing things is the only way, is the best

(01:01:03):
way to me. 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 want it to
take decades to understand what they're even talking about and
how they think about things, because then we're going to

(01:01:25):
learn something about ourselves, not just the aliens. We're gonna
learn about what's unusual about us. Where do we stand,
what 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

(01:01:46):
things that drive us and make 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

(01:02:08):
many ideas out there that we haven't even imagined because
we might not have the capacity to think outside of
our little box.

Speaker 3 (01:02:15):
The book is called Do Aliens Speak Physics? Daniel Whitson,
Thank you so much for joining us today.

Speaker 4 (01:02:21):
Thank you very much, super funing conversation. Thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:02:27):
All right.

Speaker 3 (01:02:27):
So much appreciation to Daniel Whitson for joining us today.
The book Do Aliens 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 to Blow Your

(01:02:49):
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. They can be old, new, good, bad, well known,

(01:03:10):
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. Let's see.

(01:03:32):
If you would like to follow us on social media,
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guess that does it. So huge thanks as always to
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again to Daniel Whitson for joining us. If you would

(01:03:55):
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Speaker 2 (01:04:14):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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