Would aliens have the same physics as us?

[Magical Realist]

It's a profound question, whether an alien species on a distant planet would develop the same physics that humans have or something entirely different. It highlights immediately the issue of how much physics is a absolutely true and universal model of the world, or if it only arose entirely from the relative and perspectivally-bound experience of bipedal primates. Maybe at our primitive stage our science is only like a compass, which works in helping us to navigate our world. But the aliens have GPS, which works even better and enables their own navigation thru all of spacetime.

[C C]

The most radical possibility might be where the "knowledge" is implicit and inherited (not explicitly expressed and conveyed by a communication system). Accumulated in the routines of a species over the course of eons of evolutionary trial and error. Probably applicable to a superorganism, of which social insects are an example on Earth. No single individual would explicitly apprehend such, but what the group collectively did would verify a hidden grasp of physics. Akin to how the cells constituting metazoan animals mastered the art of chemistry (producing countless different biochemicals that regulate processes) -- all without intelligence. "Competence without understanding", as Dennett once put it.

But if more along our ways... We might imagine how weird ancient Indian physics would seem in terms of its nomenclature, if those cultures had really had atomic capabilities thousands of years ago as coincidentally described in that anachronism of the Mahabharata: Nuclear war in ancient times.

So alternative conceptual frameworks and technical descriptions or guided behavior should offer the same or superior predictability and practical results, compared to own (though a high grade of inferiority would still qualify).

[Yazata]

Space aliens will inhabit the same universe that we do. Assuming the uniformity of nature, the physical world will behave the same for them as for us. They will have the same chemical elements etc. That's the physical realism idea. So if we interpret "the same physics" to refer to how reality actually behaves, then yes, aliens will have the same physics.

But... if we look at the history of physics here on Earth, we see that the ideas with which the same physical reality was conceptualized have changed dramatically over time. Our physical ideas do seem to be awfully contingent on the historical process that gave rise to them.

Simply by the nature of the thing, space aliens will have entirely different histories-of-ideas than we do. It might even go beyond that to different psychologies and different ways of thinking entirely. (Imagine intelligent social insects or something like that.)

So my expectation is that space aliens will live in the same fundamental reality that we do... but they are likely to conceptualize it very differently.

CC's post is very good and deserves thought. I'll reply to this part, in light of what I just said up above:

So alternative conceptual frameworks and technical descriptions or guided behavior should offer the same or superior predictability and practical results, compared to own (though a high grade of inferiority would still qualify).

Science isn't just what people/aliens think about their surroundings or describing their conceptual vocabularies in doing it. There's a functional aspect that separates the practice of science from philosophy or religion or the history of either of them.

So does alien physics actually work in the practical, predictability, engineering sense?

We like to believe that our present day science works better than ancient or medieval science. Well, what if some extraterrestrial science, some totally different way of conceptualizing a shared reality, some totally different way of attacking problems, works even better in solving those problems than our science? (It might give them super-luminal or intertialess drives that seem impossible to our current way of thinking...)

Just because our current science works better than ancient, medieval or 19th century science, doesn't mean that it's the last word on anything. It's just the best that we human beings have at the moment.

[Magical Realist]

Assuming aliens would probably achieve super AI at some point, it seems likely to me that all bets are off and anything becomes possible at that point. The vast intelligence of those artilects will likely take over, resulting in technologies and enhanced cognitive abilities far beyond anything we can imagine. Hence indeed anti-gravity, zero mass matter, and even teleportation.