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