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Why aliens might not “speak physics” the same way we do - C C - Oct 30, 2025
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/aliens-might-not-speak-physics
KEY POINTS: In recent centuries, humans have uncovered a tremendous set of details about the fundamental laws and components of nature that make everything up. It’s perhaps easy to assume that any alien civilization that becomes at least as technologically advanced and capable as we are, would uncover those same physical rules, but is that necessarily true? In Do Aliens Speak Physics?, physicist Daniel Whiteson thoughtfully argues that perhaps it’s anthropocentric to consider that arriving at our current laws is inevitable... (MORE details)
RE: Why aliens might not “speak physics” the same way we do - Magical Realist - Nov 3, 2025
Quote:There’s a class of philosophers who argue that all we have are patchwork explanations of the Universe. That between the patches, there is no methodological explanation for it. There’s this book by Nancy Cartwright called How the Laws of Physics Lie, which suggests that you can’t even test what’s happening between the patches because the experiments are too complicated. Take a simple example. Drop a penny outside, and, can you describe it? Yes, you can use Newton’s equations to describe it. Okay, now turn it into a leaf. Can you describe it? Sure, you can add air resistance. Your theory has to get a little bit more complicated, but you can still describe it. Okay, now add a tornado. So the leaf has very, very complex interactions and add 10 leaves and have them stuck together by rubber bands. And I can keep adding details to this situation until it becomes impossible for us practically to make a prediction for what’s going to happen.
We’re already there in our atmosphere, right? We can predict the weather a few days out, but not a week or two weeks, so Nancy Cartwright’s argument essentially is that there’s always some situation where we are incapable of predicting what happens. And so it might be that there are corners of the Universe where, as she says, what happens, happens by half. And to me, that’s very alien to imagine that the Universe could be not following some laws, that there isn’t some set of rules out there that determines what really happens?
But Cartwright’s argument essentially is we can’t know that; that’s a philosophical assumption. That’s a philosophical position: to say the Universe has to be logical, has to follow laws. So far, in our experience, it has, but again, we’re not guaranteed. And so one of the questions of this book is to help us get our assumptions and wonder, well, which of the things that we assume are ironclad, and which are we just assuming? And which things do we actually have data to support? And a lot of people, it turns out, feel just as strongly about philosophical opinions as topics that we do have data to support them.
I recently learned from watching a wonderful Nova special on the evolution of civilizations that written language evolved three times in our world history. Scholars continue to debate whether these revolutionary moments were truly isolated discoveries or results of human migration around the world. But it suggests to me that if something as highly specific as written language can emerge in a species 3 times in history, that there is a sort objectivity to written language, like it was always just there waiting to be stumbled upon. Would mathematics be the same way, particularly considering how remarkably powerful it is in modelling our universe?
In the end I feel like aliens WOULD discover their own versions of the laws of physics, if not many others, over millions of years. And this is based on the fact that they would be embedded in the same reality we are and subject to the same laws and sentient in a way that would expose them to their own presumably inquisitive minds.
Is this an overly anthropocentric hope of mine? Perhaps. But what DOESN'T retain the scent of humans that we have created and discovered in the past 10,000 years? Our unique consciousness always leaves its fingerprints on everything we reach for and grasp. Every model we construct for understanding reality humanizes that reality a little more. It is never THE Reality we experience. It is always OUR reality.
RE: Why aliens might not “speak physics” the same way we do - Syne - Nov 3, 2025
(Nov 3, 2025 07:48 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: But it suggests to me that if something as highly specific as written language can emerge in a species 3 times in history, that there is a sort objectivity to written language, like it was always just there waiting to be stumbled upon.
Would the same reasoning hold for many independently arising religions?
RE: Why aliens might not “speak physics” the same way we do - Magical Realist - Nov 3, 2025
Yes...there are fundamental themes and metaphors and archetypes that recur across many different religions and mysticisms and mythologies. Joseph Campbell was an astute proponent of such an underlying unity or phenomenal substrate--an objective though transcendent dimension of all human experience. We could reasonably infer this cosmic dimension to not be limited to our own planet or species, if the aliens are in any sense alive and conscious like we are. A speciel "memory" or collective unconsciousness comparable to our own.