Do Aliens Speak Physics, with Daniel Whiteson

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 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 Andy Warner. And now onto my conversation with Daniel. Daniel Whitson, Welcome back to the show.

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

kind of tell a little story. There's some fiction writing in this book. It's mostly you know, nonfiction scientific writing and philosophical writing. But I like these little fictional scenarios, and I think we might want to get into a couple of these as we go along. But before we do that, to sort of frame how you explore the question of do aliens speak physics? And could we communicate about physics with them? You extend the classic Drake equation,

So could you explain that? Maybe first explain what the original Drake equation is and how it works, and then also explain the way you extend it and the terms you added to it to get at this alien physics conference question.

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

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 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 there aliens out there? And why haven't we heard from them? He broke that into pieces, and he starts by calculating how many stars are in the universe, what fraction of those stars might have life, what fraction of stars with life develop civilization? How long do those civilizations. Last, it's

a classic approach in science. You have a problem that's too big to solve, so you break it into a bunch of pieces, none of which you maybe can solve, but some of which you can make a little bit of progress on. So you're not completely steymied by your inability to make progress in one area because you can move in another area. And for example, we now know that there are lots and lots of stars in the universe.

Every galaxy that's out there has like hundreds of billions of stars, and there's hundreds of billions of galaxies, so 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 you know, earth like according to some definition, So we're talking a huge number of earth like planets in

the universe. But you know, the Drake equation is multiplicative the number of aliens that contact us is the number of stars times the fraction that have life, times the fraction that are technological, et cetera. So if any of those numbers are zero, were screwed, and we don't know what fraction of those planets have life, and what fraction of that life becomes technological, and how long that life lasts.

So that's the structure of the Drake equation, and we thought it was a natural thing to do to extend that to answer the question how many alien civilizations are there out there that we can talk science with? And so to do that we broke it into several questions. We said, well, what fraction them do science? You know, is that even a thing aside of Earth is science like a human endeavor? Maybe everybody else is bored by the question, or you know, maybe they're technological but not scientific.

And then we asked, well, can we communicate with them, you know, can we figure out a way to have a mental mind meld about these things? Do they ask the same kind of questions that we ask? Are are we curious about the same things? Do they find and

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

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

scenario to imagine this. Could you briefly describe kind of sketch the contact scenario and then talk about some reasons for thinking a species maybe could actually communicate between stars or travel between stars without science.

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

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

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

You know, people have been like fermenting yeast into bread and beer, which is you know, fairly technological without understanding anything about what was going on in it. Or people have been making swords, you know, which requires if you want to understand it, like pretty deep level knowledge of like solid state physics and metallurgy. But there were masters making incredible devices well before they understood why, and even

people exploring the earth. Right if you say science began a few hundred years ago, well, humanity has been like venturing from shore to shore for thousands of years. And so I took that as an inspiration and try to come up with an example of how aliens might get

here without being scientific. And I was thinking about a planet where you have some critters and they're floating through their oceans, and on their planet, the atmosphere is thicker than it is on ours, and so the boundary between the ocean and the atmosphere is a little fuzzier, and so it's not so crazy to imagine that they might stumble across some way to not just navigate their oceans, but also navigate their atmospheres, you know, just like we did.

And in this case, these folks are like little bladders that can absorb, can emit air into order to go up, or accept ballast to go down. They're like little submarines essentially, but they learn to navigate their atmosphere, and then it's not too big a leap to imagine that maybe they also figure out how to coat themselves in something so 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 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 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 it to us because they're like, what do you mean? Like, here's how you do it? What do you mean why? How Like.

human minds? You know, I was trying to think about this, and I had a suspicion that I don't know. I suspect that the question why has got to be pretty 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.

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.

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, even if that problem is like, hey, how do we

take down this mammoth for dinner? Or you know, how do I solve this social problem with my neighbor? You know, which I think humans have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. But it could be not you know, it could be that that's as fundamental as like eating sweat things for breakfast. You know, the first time I went traveling and I was like, hmm, wow, people have like weird spicy fish soup for breakfast. I didn't even imagine that you could have other kinds of things for breakfast.

Or the first time I saw like a toilet in a country where like you don't just sit, you know, I was like, oh, whoa mind blowing. There's so many areas where we can't imagine beyond our experience, and I'm hopeful when the aliens come that they're going to blow our minds with their different way of having a relationship with the universe. One of my favorite hypotheticals is maybe

they used to do science. Maybe science is some sort of primitive way of understanding the universe, and what they have is like you know, science plus the way we think about natural philosophy, Like we look at Aristotle and we're like, cool, bro, you made a lot of progress just thinking about stuff. Why didn't you think about doing experiments? You know, empiricism is obvious, like come on, just go outside and try it for ten minutes. Why argue for

hours and hours and hours. It seems obvious to us. And in that way, maybe the Aliens have upgraded their science, like, yeah, we used to do it that way, but then we came up with this other trick that's so much better. I can't believe you guys are still doing experiments or whatever. And so it could be that they don't do science because they've left it behind for something even more powerful.

the analogy with differentficulties in deciphering lost human languages. Could you talk a bit about that and how illuminating that those kind of troubles we've faced in the past are.

us are ancient human civilizations. So I thought, let's dig 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 was that this is a lot harder than I thought.

I mean, these are humans, right, they have the same brain as we do, they live in the same world as we do, they have the same senses, that's the same environment, and they have lots and they left us lots of examples. But in some cases we still have not decoded their writing. Like, yes, we decoded ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, there's an important caveat in that story, but we have not,

for example, decoded Etruscan writing. And the Etruscan's like lived just a couple thousand years ago next to the Romans, and the Romans talk all about them, and we have lots of examples, and yet it still remains, you know, undecipherable. It's incredible to me. It tells me that like the barrier to accessing another intelligence, even one hosted on the same substrate, is very, very challenging. And it hints that in order to make these mental connections you need one

essential thing, which is common context. You need to be able to like point at something and say, this is an apple, right, let's agree on the word apple, or

you know, this is one, this is two. And you know, 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 written language from an alien species because we have no idea what it's supposed to look like. How do you know when you've decoded it correctly? You have no clues, no handles, and the best example of that, I think is Egyptian hieroglyphics. You know, there's this famous story the Rosetta Stone. They had hieroglyphics, nobody could decode them. Then we found this cheat sheet, right, it's got Greek on it, and it's

got the same stuff in hieroglyphics. Since you're like, oh, I know how to translate these words from one to the other, I can go from there, do dot dot, I've cracked hieroglyphics. But that's not the way it happened. The way it happened is they found the Rosetta Stone, and it still took them twenty years. Twenty years when they had examples of decoded text in both languages. Why did it take so long Because they were making a

fundamentally mistaken assumption about the structure of hieroglyphics. They looked at hieroglyphics and they were like, oh, these are pictograms. The ones that look like birds are mean birds, someway. The ones that looked like water mean water some way, but they're not. Egyptian hieroglyphics turn out to be phonetic in the same way that our language is, and so

like a hieroglyphic means a sound, not an idea. They only realized this when they were doing a deep comparison with the Greek and they found some phrases in Greek that translated to sounds, and they noticed that these sounds were common across these across the translation. And so it was only because not only did they have examples of the translated Greek, but they understood how this Greek was spoken,

that they could crack this code. So the key was cultural context, was having something in common to sort of nail languages to get other And the same is true of like Mayan. Mayan was cracked because there's still people speaking a variant of Mayan, and so understanding this like cultural expression, the way this is spoken and used, is

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

one plus one equal to everywhere? This starts with a fun contact scenario or contact hypothesis about contact that is made with the star that's alive, that's kind of bioplasma, but doesn't seem to respond to mathematical or numerical information.

And so you asked the question, is it plausible that there could be an intelligent species that maybe even has technology in some way we could think about it, or at least has you know, capabilities of contact with another species, 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.

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 quantum field theory and he noticed that these particles were very similar, the photon and the W and the z,

but they were different. One of them had mass and one of them had no mass. And why is that? And anyway, how do you give masses to all the fundamental particles without breaking this other symmetry. And he came up with a mechanism, a mathematical mechanism. He said, you 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.

something to the laws of physics because it's prettier. And yet when he went out there to find if there is an element of the universe that corresponds to this missing piece, he found, Oh, yes, it is. It just had been overlooked. So again the math guided him. And to me, that's really powerfully suggestive to say, like, Wow, the universe isn't just described by math. It runs on math,

like it is fundamentally mathematical. And I remember having this moment where I personally came to believe that as an undergrad learning like quantum mechanics and hearing about like bells inequality and all these experiments, and I was like, Wow, this is too accurate to be approximate, too accurate to just be a description, right, this is the rules, this is the source code of the universe. So I used

to deeply, deeply believe that. But you know, the more you dig into the philosophy of math, the more you realize this sits on on a bunch of assumptions, assumptions which sound plausible, but when you dig into them, like do we really have good arguments for them? And as you say, some of them relate to like arithmetic. In the last couple of hundreds of years, philosophers of math have asked questions like, well, what are the basic foundations

of math? Like what are the starting rules the few things you need to assume from which you can build everything else? And the goal of that is not just like, hey, let's be nerdy and figure out what the rules are, but like, let's examine those assumptions and wonder like could they have been something else? You know, the way we might like see the fundamental equation of the universe and ask like, is it this way? Could it have been

the other way? You learned something by seeing the fundamental nature written down, And in the last couple hundred years we've learned We've made a lot of progress, Like, wow, most of mathematics is based on arithmetic, and arithmetic itself is based on a few basic axioms. They're called p and O's axioms, and those can be described in terms of set theory, like you know this is inside that, and a barber who shaves himselves can shave other barbers

or whatever. But at the core of it, there's a question mark, like Godle's theorem tells us that we can't describe everything in math using those fundamental axioms. And then even if you have a bunch of fundamental axioms, there are always going to be things that aren't captured by it. You know, there are things in arithmetic that are true that cannot be proven with our axioms, which tells you, like, maybe we don't really fundamentally understand what's at the core of mathematics.

together an alternative theory of gravity. You know. He starts with Newton's theory, which you can write in terms of like a gravitational potential and a gravitational field, which is very handy. And newton theory famously has an equation in it and you can like calculate things with numbers, and it's like, do we need that or is that just really helpful? So he put together this theory of gravity with no numbers. There is no gravitational field. He says,

you can't observe that directly anyway. All you see is motion of particles. So maybe that's just like an intermediate step that's useful to us. And then he's like, maybe you don't need numbers at all. Maybe you don't need to say the field has a value here, and you know this has this the son has a mass of this number. Maybe all you need are relationships. You know this one has more mass than the other one. This

is a greater distance than that one. If he structure in terms of relationships, he was able to recover the not the equations of motion right because it's not like he's not dealing with numbers, but a description of the behavior gravitationally without using Newton's theory and without using any numbers. So in the philosophy of mass, this approach is called nominalism. Essentially says that numbers are something we made up, you know, one, two, four,

They don't exist anywhere in the world. Like where is the number four? It's sort of hilarious philosophy question that you could just brush off. It's like, well, it sounds like you've been smoking too many banana peels. But you know, if four exists outside of human knowledge and before us, then like where is it? It's sort of a reasonable question, Like, you know, if it's part of the universe, it should have a location. Everything else that's part of the universe

has a location. So maybe it's just some thing we constructed to help us think about stuff. And so it's pretty hard to grow like a theory of physics without math, And that's his point. His point is like look, math is very useful, but that doesn't mean it's necessary the way like, yes, having a car in Los Angeles is very useful, but you could walk everywhere it would be a huge pain. Right. It's obviously an advantage, but it

doesn't mean it's fundamental. And that opens up the door to like, well, maybe aliens found some other way to think. Maybe math reflects the way our minds work instead of the way the universe works, and if alien minds work differently, they might come up with something else we wouldn't call math.

Or if aliens evolved in a similar situation where they have bodies that are easy to distinguish and so counting makes sense, and they have like, you know, interesting economies that are similar hours, they might have evolved the similar concepts. So it comes down to essentially how much we have in common with them evolutionarily and conceptually, whether or not we think they might have math, but it's definitely not necessary.

And even here on Earth. I was surprised when I was doing my research to learn that different cultures here on Earth have different relationships with counting. You know, you might look at a bunch of stuff on a desk and I can ask you like, oh, how many things are on the desk and you say, oh, there's four things. But somebody who's Japanese, for example, they have different categories of counting, and they would never group together things that are like long and thin with things that are like

flat and short. So if you're like pencils and CDs on a desk, they would say, oh, there's two pencils and two CDs. You can't say that's four things because they're different categories, right, And that's a hint where you can dig in and say, like, well, when do we group things together? Like why do I say this four things? What is the category of a thing? Like why do I say these things are similar enough that I can call them a thing? And in the end, that's a

bit of an arbitrary distinction. Like if you look at a bunch of apples on a table, I could say there's ten apples, or I could say, well, there's this apple, and there's that apple, and there's the other apple, and they're all unique apple and so on what basis am I saying they're all the same. That's culture, that's I'm saying the differences are not important, and that's arbitrary and like, I'm probably right there are about ten apples. Like I'm

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

aliens argue about planets? I found this really interesting because I don't think I'd ever considered it this way. But you start here with a with a contact hypothetical about the inhabitants of a subsurface ocean on Jupiter's moon Europa, who see everything in terms of Eddy's kind of swirling swarms of matter in motion, and that that's as fundamental to their physical view of reality as the idea of

particles and discrete objects is to us. I thought that was really interesting, the idea that we could meet with another speci And of course from here you build up the idea that we could meet with this other specie. We could both have science and both be able and willing to communicate with each other, but end up finding each other's physical metaphors for describing reality uninteresting and not very useful. I don't think I don't think i'd ever

that had never entered my mind. So could you elaborate?

Without understanding quantum gravity. Like, we don't understand the fundamental nature of the universe for sure, we don't, you know, like we've zoomed down to electrons and quarks and whatever. We know that's not the final story, and we don't know how far below that is the final story. Is there even a final story? And yet people have been like calculating how to lob cannonballs over castle walls for

a long time. And people live in the world, and you know, we have very fancy technology that describes the behavior of transistors and all this sorts of stuff. Why is it possible to understand the world world without understanding

the basic rules of it. There's this sort of magic 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, So it's not like everybody was waiting, y Daniel, particle physicists tell us what is the rules so that we can then extrapolate upwards to biology, like you could just go ahead and do biology, you can go ahead and do chemistry, you can do lots of classical physics. But

why does that happen? Why is that even possible? You know, if I told you I'm going to make up a bunch of random, arbitrary rules for the way the universe works at its fundamental level, you might think, okay, well, what are the consequences then for the macroscopic scale, you know, And it turns out it's weird that you don't have to know the microscopic to understand the macroscopic. And that's the thing that makes me wonder if we don't know

why that works. And this is a deep question in philosophy, why does simplicity emerge from complexity and chaos? Then how do we know we're not imposing it on the universe? How do we know there's not a cultural bias where we're like, well, there's a seeding mass of chaos out there in the universe, and we're selecting the things that are interesting to us because they're relevant to us and they come out of the way we live, and we're

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

see like rocks through space as fundamental. I mean, one way to understand this is like, think about how we describe the Solar System. Is it to scale? It never is. Whenever you see a description of the Solar System, it takes the planets and it zooms them way out of proportion.

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

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

always let us down the wrong path. And so it's hard to imagine aliens who don't understand planets and don't think about the universe in terms of rocks orbiting stars. But if they evolve in subsurface oceans, maybe they just think about, you know, little chaotic vortices and they build up their explanation in the universe from that. So that's what this chapter is about. And I had a lot of fun talking to philosophers about emergence, and it realized that I had a lot of assumptions about the way

emergence works. Like, for example, I assumed that the universe has a fundamental level, that there is some firmament where the rules are set and everything emerges from that, and maybe we don't know exactly how, and it's complicated the way that like hurricanes are complicated, but we think they follow rules, but that's not necessarily true. Like what if

there is no firmament. What if it's just like layers of emergence all the way down, or what if you know, they don't follow from below, Maybe things don't bubble upwards. Maybe every layer has its own set of laws that are somehow independent. There's a lot of basic philosophical assumptions you make when you take a sort of particle physics point of view there.

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 and of course you know hire biology is more of an approximation. It's based on emergence. But I think a lot of people would have that in their head, but think, well, when you get down to you know, particles, that's the

base level. But I love the example you use in the book of the charge of the electron and how actually, while we have good approximation for how that works, that still relies on zoom settings. Could you explain that example.

more of a mess philosophically. You get ten particle theorists in a room and you ask them what is a particle? You're gonna get ten answers, Like it's crazy. Like this concept is historical, it's intuitive for us. It comes out of our need to describe the universe in terms of like little bits of stuff, and in many ways I think it's holding us back. You know, we have a glimpse now in quantum field theory that things work differently, but we're still sort of like clinging to this idea anyway.

The current idea of a particle is hard to describe because particles are by themselves. Like you think of an electron as a tiny dot with a negative charge on it. Cool, little ball, Yeah, people think a little ball, right, And there it is. There's your intuition, your classical intuition. I live in the universe with rocks and little bits of stuff, and so everything is made out of little bits of stuff, right. It's the way you might laugh at the ancient Greeks,

and we're still doing it. But you think of the electron, even if you like think, well, it's not a ball of stuff, it's a point, right, and it's got a negative sign on it. And where does that negative sign come from? Well, we measure it in experiments, right. We know the charge of the electron. We have the famous oil drop experiment that told us the mass to charge ratio, et cetera. But is that the charge of the electron itself? Because the electron, because it has a charge, is always

interacting with the electromagnetic field. It makes a field and as it moves that field ripples, and so the right way to describe an electron either is in terms of a field around it, or equivalently as a cloud of virtual photons. Right, Photons are ripples in the electromagnetic field, and so from the particle point of view, you have the electron. It's surrounded by this cloud of virtual photons, and those virtual photons change the charge that you measure.

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

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

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

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

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

think that our particles within it. Right, this basic unit of our imagination is something that's not really an appropriate description of the universe. And so that to me smells of humanity, of cultural choices, of being linked to our intuition, the preference, the way that we like to hear the answers, 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.

you're done right, Like that's it. But there's an assumption there that there's a unique description, that there's only one description, one way to answer this question, And it actually makes a lot more sense to imagine that there might be multiple descriptions. I mean, like, consider any time you have data, you measure something, you have data points, and then you try to describe it, describe it by like drawing a line through it. Maybe it's a straight line, maybe it's

a wiggly line. Maybe you have some model you're fitting to your data. That model is describing things between your data points that you have not observed. And even if you take infinite amounts of data, there will always be multiple models that fit the data. So it actually kind of makes sense to imagine you could have multiple ways to describe the same universe, and I think this conflicts with your natural intuition. They're like, yeah, but there's a

true answer. You know, the universe runs some way and we just have to figure it out. And maybe we're right, or maybe the aliens are right, and maybe our theory of quantum fields is wrong and maybe their theory of quantum fields is right or whatever. But there is a truth. And that's a philosophical assumption saying that there's a single objective truth that we could discover and it's unique. How

do you know you don't know. That's exactly the kind of philosophical assumption I want to sort of reveal in this book, saying that we don't. I'm not saying that 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 upgraded on understanding of gravity, didn't just give us better equations that were more accurate. He completely revised the story of what's happening. You know, it's not masses pulling on each other. It's space itself is bending and curving, and

gravity is not even a force. So there is history of overthrowing our ideas, which suggests that there are other ideas out there which could better or at least equivalently describe the universe that we see, that we could conceive of right now. If you are a super genius, you could sit down and come up with another way to describe gravity or quantity, fields or whatever that's equivalent or superior.

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

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

And we don't have that. So all we can do is look at our history, and we have some fascinating examples there, like you know, Newtonian mechanics was supplanted by the Rongen mechanics and Hamiltonian mechanics, which is a different way to think about like how things move. If you want to calculate, you know, how does the ball move with the parabola, you can use Newtonian mechanics and we do that. You know, F equals MA and that works.

But as soon as it gets complicated, you have your ball and a string, and the string is being held by a squirrel and the squirrels on a roller coaster, it's way too hard to use Newton's laws, like it

just becomes unsolvable. So these clever guys, Lagrange and Hamilton came up with more effective mechanics that rely essentially on energy as the fundamental principle, and you can derive Newton's laws from them, and Lagrange and mechanics and Hamiltonia mechanics are very similar, but they're all so different, and you can use both of them to describe these things. And for like more than one hundred years, people have been arguing about are these two theories just the same dressed

in different clothes or are they fundamentally different? And last ten years or twenty years or so, they've been digging into, like, well, what does it mean to be different? You know, this is the way philosophy makes progress. They're like, well, what is the word? Meaning of the word is mean anyway? So it gets pretty nerdy and abstract. But fundamentally, we

don't know. We don't know if it's possible to have multiple theories that describe the universe equivalently and are fundamentally categorically different that they tell different conceptual stories, or if both being effective means that they fundamentally have to be telling the same story. We just don't know, And we have examples on the other side, you know, like quantum mechanics.

We had matrix equations and we had wave equations. You know, Schrodinger and Heisenberg and von Neumann showed okay, guys, these are actually the same thing. You know, just you have different operators and different kinds of math, and they seem pretty different, but actually they are the same, which is kind of hilarious because Schortinger and Heisenberg famously sort of hated each other and really didn't like the other's approached, Like, ough,

I find it gross, but yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's some German dissing in the in the academic literature which is pretty fun to read. But they are fundamentally the same. So you can show that's not two theories, right, that is just one theory expressed in different clothing. So that would be fascinating. Right when the aliens show up with their theory, it might be very different and we might be able to show that it's essentially the same, or we might discover, wow, this is a very different story

about what's happening in the universe. It really is a different way to explain things that can't be mapped to ours. And what would that mean? You know, what would that mean if the universe has multiple correct descriptions, it means something about the nature of truth, right, but what is really happening? If there is anything that you can say is really happening.

of people do. When you look back on scientific history, you somehow get this feeling that it's kind of faded, that it's like on track, maybe because it's not, because it feels like different than like artistic you know, creations where it's like the scientific discoveries and history are bound by nature, and so because they're discovering things about nature, just kind of feels inevitable that it would have developed in the.

But you know, there's a lot of moments in the history of science that were random, that were accidental, where we discovered something that we could have discovered much earlier, and it could have totally changed the path of our science. And this is one of the reasons I wrote the book in the structure I did with this Drake equation structure because it let me make some assumptions, Like at this point in the book, I'm saying, all right, let's

push aside all of the philosophical questions. Let's assume aliens do science, they use math, they ask the same questions, 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 we typically late or early compared to that population? Love to know the answer to that question, you know, what is the path of science in all of those different earths? And so we can't know that, but we do have some glimmers, you know. I was able to like dig into ancient human civilizations Mayans and Chinese and the Greeks

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

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 kicked off like the Curees and their analysis of radiation, and then you know Rutherford and his analysis of the nucleus and like basically quantum mechanics right, that was the moment that kicked off everything that led to quantum mechanics.

What if that had happened one hundred years earlier. What if little Einstein was taught quantum mechanics in the crib, then when he was developing his theory of general relativity, would he have come up with some quantum version. I mean, it's it's just one example, but it shows you how randomness affects the development of our science and it could

have taken us on different paths. And so the fact that we're stuck right now unifying quantum mechanics and gravity and that even Einstein wasn't able to do it, maybe it's because we started too late with quantu caad And if quantum mechanics was more intuitive to the smarty pants in the last one hundred years, maybe we would have

made more progress. Or maybe there's some other crazy and kind of obvious discovery we haven't made yet and on all the other earths they have and so they're like way far ahead of us because we just haven't like stumbled across XYZ, you know. Or maybe we're very far ahead and most earths they're still using stone tools. Who knows, but It would certainly affect what it's like to talk to aliens. You know, are they on the same single

path that we are on? Are there multiple paths up this sort of mountain to figure out the nature of the universe? And where did their path diverge? You know, did they start totally differently from us or do they just like randomly discover things in a different order. Really really fascinating to learn that, and so that's why I dug into the sort of ancient history. You know, we're

the Mayans being mathematical. If the Mayans, for example, had 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

than the European predictions. So you know, we certainly lost a whole thread there.

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

you know, we're starting from a good number. I think that when they do arrive, that we are going to be shocked by how human are so sciences. I mean, I think I persuaded myself when I was writing this book that there's a lot of assumptions we're making that you know, they're not going to have coffee and croissants

for breakfast. They're going to be so much weirder than we imagine, because even on Earth, life is always weirder than we imagine, always discovering super weird, gunky stuff, and so it's sort of it's really just hubris to imagine that our way of thinking and our way of doing things is the only way, is the best way to me. It's equivalent to like geocentrism, you know, to put ourselves at the center of the intellectual universe and say this is the only way. And I'm looking forward to that.

I want my mind blown. I want it to be bizarre and difficult. I wanted to take decades to understand what they're even talking about and how they think about things, because then we're going to learn something about ourselves, not just the aliens. We're going to learn about what's unusual about us. Where do we stand? Is weird about being human? And it's going to help define what it means to be human and to be a human scientist. This is how we think about things, This is how we ask

about things. These are kind of answers that we find satisfying and that we accept and don't ask more questions about. And these are the things that drive us and make us curious. You know, so I think, I hope, I guess I have a hunch, and I hope that aliens do science in a much weirder way than anybody imagines that even is imagined in this book, right. I don't claim that what we've described in this book spans the

whole space of ideas. I just want to give people a flavor that there are many ideas out there that we haven't even imagined because we might not have the capacity to think outside of our little box.

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.

again to Daniel Whitson for joining us. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.