Is physics discovered or invented?

Daniel and Kelly get concrete about whether physics is the map or the territory, the topic of Daniel's new book "Do Aliens Speak Physics?" See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

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• 1:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Imagine the day the aliens finally arrive. Maybe you're picturing an invasion. Ramps dramatically unfolding from gleaming ships, snarling tentacled monsters slithering down, rapidly overrunning Earth's meager defenses? And yeah, that's fair. We're as likely to be unceremoniously fried into human crisps by a planet-wide death ray as anything else. But this is seeing the alien arrival glass as half-empty. Instead, let's look at the glass as half-full, even if we aren't sure yet what it's full of. Maybe aliens have figured out the answers to puzzles that remain impenetrable to us, like what everything is made out of at the smallest level, or why time only flows

• 2:26Daniel Whiteson?

  forward, or how big the universe is. What if aliens know for a fact how our universe began and how it all might end? What if they know what it's like inside a black hole, or actually understand quantum mechanics like the back of their tentacle? Maybe to them, the universe isn't a place of consistent mystery, but one that tightly follows some basic rules. And what if they could just tell us how everything works, so we don't have to blindly hack away for decades or centuries to gain this elusive knowledge? They might carry the product of millions or billions of years of alien scientific thought to catapult us unimaginably far in our quest to understand this wonderful,

• 3:06Daniel Whiteson?

  bizarre, violent, and beautiful cosmos. If our species met up, physicists hope that we'd be able to geek out together, sharing notes on this glorious galactic journey of discovery. But could that really happen? A lot of scientists, especially physicists, believe it could. They imagine that unraveling the secrets of nature is a universal project that would be shared by the scientists of alien species across the galaxy, and that physics describes everything in the universe, not just life on Earth, and so should also form the foundation of alien science. Therefore, we should be able to use physics as a mental bridge between our species. But hold on a second. Are we accepting those arguments

• 3:48Daniel Whiteson?

  too quickly? Have we really given the question careful thought, or are we blinded by our fantasy of galactic scientific cooperation and the narrowness of our own experience? We have only our one example of science here on Earth, so it's hard to be sure how much of it might be colored by human nature and culture. Are human physics and math the only way to think about the universe, or are they just the only way we can imagine it? Are the laws of physics something universal, something we have discovered, or are the human something we have invented? Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Alien Universe.

• 4:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly. I study parasites and space, but I don't think about aliens as much as Daniel does.

• 4:45Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I do want to figure out the secrets of the universe myself, but I'd rather just download them from alien brains, if possible.

• 4:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that'd be nice. All right. So my question for you, Daniel, when you think about aliens, which is apparently all the time.

• 5:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Embarrassingly high fraktion of my brain, yes.

• 5:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right. For someone who's not like a conspiracy theorist or a cryptid fan, you think about them a lot.

• 5:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Hmm, you're making some assumptions there.

• 5:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  I've known you for a while. But when you imagine aliens, what do they look like in your head?

• 5:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, boy. Wow. You know, I think it's almost impossible to anticipate what aliens actually look like, or at least I hope so. You know, there's two scenarios. One is aliens show up and they're basically Star Trek, you know, they're humans with fuzzy foreheads or, you know, just some little tweak on the kind of life we have here on Earth. The other scenario is they show up and they're so much weirder than we could ever possibly imagine. And that, to me, is the fascinating scenario. That's the non-Starbucks scenario, you know? It's like you don't want to travel the world and discover Starbucks on every corner. That's boring. You have Starbucks at home.

• 5:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Says you.

• 6:00Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, I like Starbucks too, but I prefer like local weird coffee. That's why I go traveling. And so if aliens show up and they're not really weird, I'm going to be disappointed in the universe.

• 6:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Quick side note, when I travel, I do like to go to the McDonald's in other countries because, but only because I like to see what other stuff they have on their menus, you know, because they usually don't have like the US standard menu. And I like to see like, oh, what's the, how did McDonald's homogenize with this culture to create something new? But also, confession time, Zach and I were in Versailles for our honeymoon and we had this lovely breakfast and we went to go throw away our receipt in our trash and I noticed. A McDonald's arch. And I was like, wait a minute. And it was, it looked so nice. We didn't realize we had gotten breakfast at McDonald's on our honeymoon. And it was delicious. We had a great time.

• 6:55Daniel Whiteson?

  In your defense, McDonald's in France is really a different kind of thing.

• 6:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 6:58Daniel Whiteson?

  There really is much more upscale. Absolutely.

• 7:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, and that's like a cultural insight or something that I feel like you get by visiting the McDonald's. But, but anyway, I don't exclusively eat at McDonald's.

• 7:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I went to a conference in Taipei once with an Israeli colleague, and he ate every single meal at Subway or McDonald's. And like, this is Taipei, people. I mean, the food there is incredible. I was a vegetarian at the time, and we had this 19 course banquet dinner, and they served me a separate, different vegetarian thing for each of the 19 courses. And each one blew my mind, that the food there is unbelievable. Plus, I also went to the night market and like, ate all sorts of weird stuff that probably had eyeballs in it. But to me, that was the joy of it, right? But he was like, yeah, no, I'm not touching any of that.

• 7:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, hold on, if you're a vegetarian, but you eat eyeballs, is that like an eyeballatarian? Like a pescatarian only eats fish?

• 7:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I was a vegetarian at the time, but I also wanted to explore. And I was at the night market, and I couldn't speak the language, so I took some risks. And I'm not sure whether or not I ate eyeballs. I think probability Daniel ate eyeballs that evening, 50%.

• 8:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, good, good on you. It's good to try new stuff.

• 8:04Daniel Whiteson?

  But that's okay.

• 8:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 8:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Anyway, the joy of traveling is exploring the universe and having your mind blown by how surprising it is, by breaking out of the box of your expectations.

• 8:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Absolutely. And you always are so great at transitioning us home. And so here we are. Today, we're talking about the joy of studying physics, and we're trying to nail down on the philosophical question, is physics discovered or invented?

• 8:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. It's the physics that we have developed here on Earth. Are we figuring out basic rules of the universe? Or are we just telling a human story? One that's approximate and effective and kind of only makes sense to us? And this is a philosophical question for sure. But I like to think about it in concrete terms and inject aliens into it by imagining the scenario that aliens are arriving. And we try to talk to them about this because that's when it matters. Right. You might think, who cares if it's discovered or invented? It works, right? But number one, I'm curious about whether it's really deeply true. And also I am concerned about this situation. What if aliens show up and they have these answers, but we can't make a scientific connection with them? That would be so frustrating.

• 9:14Daniel Whiteson?

  And that's why I wrote my new book, Do Aliens Speak Physics? Out November 4th from Norton and available at all fine bookstores. Please go check it out.

• 9:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so you said that it would be a real bummer if the aliens got here and we like, you know, hadn't figured out the truth. Is that because you're worried about what they're gonna think of us? In which case I have a speech that I tell my daughter about why you shouldn't worry about what other people think? Or is it because it would inhibit our ability to communicate in that case?

• 9:44Daniel Whiteson?

  My fantasy is that the aliens deliver to us answers to some of the puzzles. You know, like, I just wanna know, what is inside a black hole? What is the real story of the universe? I would love to know the answer to these questions. And the idea that aliens have these answers out there is endlessly frustrating to me. If they could just show up and give them to us, you know, like, somebody knows the truth, please just share it with us. So my concern is that they show up and we're mismatched somehow so that we can't get those answers. Maybe we're not smart enough to understand it, or maybe we're going down a different path, or maybe they have a different way of explaining these things, or maybe they're asking different questions. You know, they perceive the universe differently and they're not interested in the questions we're asking.

• 10:29Daniel Whiteson?

  And so I'm worried about these scenarios where we're mismatched with the aliens and so we can't have that moment of scientific cross-mogination.

• 10:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, do you think it's possible that we're on the right track and they're not? Or if they get, if they get to us, then they must be on the right track because they're doing stuff we can't?

• 10:47Daniel Whiteson?

  That's a great question. I think if we're on different tracks, that probably says something about the nature of the universe. If it can be described in different ways, then maybe there is no one truth and you can't say who's on the right track or the wrong track.

• 11:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, when I'm interested in finding the truth, what I do is I reach out to the extraordinaries. And so that's what we did. We reached out to our listeners and we asked, are the laws of physics discovered or invented?

• 11:14Speaker 05

  I think the laws of physics are somewhere in between an invention and a discovery. Maybe closer to the discovery, I will hop.

• 11:23Speaker 06

  And Einstein didn't invent spacetime doing its bendy, squishy, stretchy thing. He just caught it in the act. So definitely discovered.

• 11:31Speaker 07

  Our curiosity and need to understand the world around us has led us to discover the laws of physics. And we've had to invent tools to help us do that, both abstract and physical. So it's a little bit of both. It seems it's some of both. There are realities in the universe that we can discover. And then we invent models to describe those realities. Surely the laws of physics are discovered because they already exist.

• 11:56Speaker 08

  I think they are discovered. I think it's a little bit of both. I think they're invented as we're kind of putting the bits and pieces together. And then the more we can understand it, the more we are discovering how things actually are.

• 12:09Speaker 06

  So the laws of physics are certainly discovered, while the maths used to describe them are human inventions.

• 12:15Speaker 07

  The laws of physics are of course discovered, but defined in our language as humans. If it is accurate and correct, it's discovered. Otherwise, it's invented because it's not correct.

• 12:27Speaker 09

  It doesn't seem to make sense to me to say that we invented gravity. I would say that the way things are is discovered. But the methodology by which we use to measure and categorize in our own terms is invented.

• 12:42Speaker 10

  But the laws of physics help us make order and meaning from what we discover. But they're not immutable. So in that sense, they're invented and can change as new things are discovered.

• 12:52Speaker 11

  I would say while the fundamental mechanisms how physics work are discovered. The laws of physics are invented. They are useful and necessary for set mechanisms to make sense to our big, mucky brains.

• 13:02Speaker 12

  I think the observations of the universe are constant. But how we describe them as laws depends on our particular moment in history and the mathematics available to us at the time.

• 13:12Speaker 13

  I think there were both. I think the laws of physics were first discovered. And then we invented the math to go with what we discovered.

• 13:18Daniel Whiteson?

  The laws of physics must be fundamental. And the way we do... Oh, there goes the dog. And we discover it by doing inventions. And that was the dog participating. I hope the dog was right. These are such great thoughtful answers. Not surprised, of course, but impressed.

• 13:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  When I started researching a city on Mars, one of the things that I loved was that people would say, oh, obviously X is the case. And then you'd go and talk to the next group and they'd be like, obviously, why is the case? I think the most common version for me was, obviously, we can't settle space right now. And then other people would be like, obviously, we're ready to do it right now. And I'd be like, oh, my goodness, how can everybody be so sure? But anyway, so we've got a nice mix of answers.

• 13:57Daniel Whiteson?

  I love those moments because then you get to dig into the assumptions that are leading you there and open people's minds. So, hold on a second, that's an assumption. That's not something you know. And maybe it feels natural to you. It feels intuitive, but do you have data? Do you, what are the reasons for holding those assumptions? Those are the moments when your mind expands, right? When you're like, oh, wait, maybe eyeballs are a good snack after all.

• 14:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  You know, I feel like at the top of my list of people that I want to correct me is you because when you're like, you know, when what you mean is, well, that sounds kind of wrong. Instead, it sounds like an amazing philosophical insight. And I'm like, oh, that's such a cool way to think about it. And then afterwards, you're like, wait a minute, Daniel told me I'm wrong.

• 14:39Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, that's my process with students and actually with podcast listeners. They often come to me with a question and the question doesn't really make sense or, and it makes me realize they've absorbed some piece of information that's wrong and that's led them down this path. And so I feel like the job of a teacher is not to say, you're wrong, here's the right answer, but to unravel their thought process to the moment they took the wrong path and show them the right way to go.

• 15:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. And that's one of the reasons I like working with you so much because I feel like you're an easy person to throw ideas out at because you're not going to be told, well, that was stupid. So, anyway, all right. Our listeners are amazing. Let's jump into what does this question even mean? What assumptions are in that question?

• 15:19Daniel Whiteson?

  I think a lot of people might hear this question, especially a lot of people in physics, and say, well, of course, the laws of physics are something we're discovering because there's something real happening out there in the universe. And we have this process of science for slowly deducing the truth. And, you know, we use mathematics to express it, and it just works so well. And so I think it's the natural point of view, the place people often start, is that, OK, physics is something we're figuring out about the universe. And lots of physicists feel that. I remember talking to string theorist Thomas van Reet, and he was like, yes, aliens will be doing string theory. I don't even doubt it. His confidence was amazing.

• 15:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep, I love that.

• 15:59Daniel Whiteson?

  And there's reasons for that. It's not an unreasonable point of view, but it's also not the only point of view. And, you know, this question is similar to another, maybe more widely discussed question in philosophy and in popular discussion, which is about mathematics, right? Is mathematics invented or discovered? And here mathematics is the language of science. And so it's natural to ask like, well, is mathematics like our mental shorthand for the way the universe works? Or is it some part of the universe? Did the concept of seven exist before there were humans? You know, or is it something that we came up with to help explain the universe around us? You know, I think a way to sum up the question essentially is,

• 16:42Daniel Whiteson?

  is physics the map or is it the territory? Are we describing something that's happening out there in the universe? Or are we revealing the actual truth?

• 16:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  So could you give me an example like, all right, so say you've got a theory, and you make some observations, and the observations matches what you would expect from the theory. Bing, bam, boom, you've got it, right? And so like, why is that not sufficient?

• 17:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, that's a great question. If you have a bunch of data and you have a theory that describes it, there's always another theory that also fits that data, right? Because you don't have infinite data. And you could have two theories that deviate between the two data points. Or, for example, I could just take our current theory and say, here's another theory that also describes the universe. It's exactly the same, but it predicts that in 100 years, electrons will lose their charge. I mean, that theory perfectly describes all of our experiments. It's sort of ridiculous. There's no reason to believe in it. Obviously has this added twist to it that you don't need and you can use outcomes razor to reject it. But it's just an example of how there are always more theories that do describe the data.

• 17:46Daniel Whiteson?

  And so you can't be guaranteed just by having a theory that matches your data that it's the only theory, or even that it's the true theory.

• 17:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I mean, could there be like some intermediate between your theory and the observation that wasn't incorporated in some way? Like you think that X causes Y, but actually there's a Z that's interacting there that wasn't in your theory at all. And that would change predictions in another environment or something?

• 18:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly, because perhaps you only have data in a certain set of circumstances, right? And you haven't seen the wider picture. For example, for hundreds of years, we thought Newton was right about gravity. And his theory bore out every single test we did until we pushed the boundaries. And we started looking at really high speed events and, you know, the orbit of Mercury and tiny little details. Only then was it revealed that Newton's theory wasn't as accurate as we thought. And in fact, the whole story that it was telling, right? Masses and forces between them, that story is not the story of what's really happening in the universe. Now we have another story, Einstein's story of curvature and spacetime, right? The two agree almost always in our experience, but they tell a very, very different story about what's really happening behind the curtains.

• 18:52Daniel Whiteson?

  And that's philosophically sort of scary because it tells you that you could have a theory that describes almost everything you see in the universe. But it could be telling the wrong story about reality. And when the aliens show up and they're like, what, what are you guys talking about? That's nonsense. Here's what's really going on.

• 19:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, but so let's imagine a world where, and heaven forbid, this is the case, where we never meet aliens. Like, I know, I'm so, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry. Would it still matter? Like if we've got predictions and we can use those to make new technologies? Does it matter if we actually are right or not? Or if we've just figured out a way to understand the world that's helpful?

• 19:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, great question. I think it depends on what's important to you. If what's important to you is let's build cool technology and, you know, self-driving toothbrushes and whatever, then it's. Doesn't really matter, right? But if your goal is to reveal something true about the universe, to understand, and I think in the end, that's what physics is about. Fundamental physics is a desire to unravel the nature of the universe, not just to build cool gizmos. Then it's fundamentally frustrating to think that we're not doing that, that we're just telling ourselves a story that works, that we're not actually hearing from the oracle and revealing the truth of the universe, that we're stuck in Plato's cave, essentially, just looking at shadows on the wall.

• 20:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, I think that would be fundamentally frustrating. Absolutely.

• 20:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I'll give you that.

• 20:16Daniel Whiteson?

  But you ask a great question because aliens haven't arrived yet. And so you might ask like, well, what progress can we make anyway on this question before the aliens show up? Do we have to just sit here and wait for the aliens to arrive and say like yes or no? Or see how it works? And so that was sort of the struggle I faced trying to write this book. It's like, well, how do we make any progress before the aliens show up? And it turns out you can, right? You can look at the structure of human science and you can ask like, well, are there places where the choices we've made are arbitrary? Or are there things that could only have happened this way? And in this area, I have to give a lot of credit to like biologists. Well, because biologists have already done this work. Congratulations, Kelly.

• 20:59Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, like biologists have thought about is life on Earth the only way it could be? We only have this one example of life on Earth, but they've tried their best to push beyond the box. For example, they see that all life on Earth has carbon as its backbone. But that doesn't mean you can assume that all life in the universe is carbon based. They imagine ways it could have gone differently. Maybe it's silicon in there, right? Or all life has water in it, but maybe it could have had ammonia. So there's been a lot of this like push beyond our one example thinking in biology. And I wanted to do the same thing for physics, to examine the places in physics where, oh, maybe this could be different or no, this absolutely has to be this way. There's no other choice as a way to try to figure out before the aliens show up,

• 21:43Daniel Whiteson?

  what truths we're revealing and what are just stories we're telling ourselves.

• 21:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, let's take a break. And when we get back, Daniel will tell us where we should start looking.

• 22:00Speaker 14

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• 22:30Speaker 15

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by rising star Sienna Spiral. What is so fascinating to you about impermanence?

• 22:52Speaker 16

  Everything about us, everything we do is temporary. And I just got terrified of that, you know, what we do with our time and how I feel like the way the world is today and how fast-paced it is and how much we don't even acknowledge anything around us, how I felt temporary to the people around me and how that made me scared and how much I wanted to last and make an impact on people. And I guess to change the way I looked at things and to change myself and to change how I guess I approached everything in my life. It's important that things are impermanent because nothing would feel special. And enjoying, you know, learning to love with knowing it's not gonna last.

• 23:25Speaker 15

  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 23:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, and we're back. So Daniel was telling us about how biologists are leading the way in like probably everything and physicists are trying to catch up. And so what kind of work are they doing to try to catch up, Daniel?

• 24:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, it's an impossible task. He is cool and is good-looking and is suave and is socially well-adjusted as biologists.

• 24:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Athletic.

• 24:08Daniel Whiteson?

  But, you know, we can...

• 24:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Why are you laughing so hard?

• 24:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, sorry. I thought you were joking. I'm gonna take that totally seriously.

• 24:21Daniel Whiteson?

  I'll have you know that we have a physics soccer game here every year and the faculty usually win.

• 24:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, nice. Way to go.

• 24:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. So, following in the footsteps of the wise biologist, we can ask like, well, where are the places where physics could be making assumptions? What are the arguments that suggest physics has to be universal and what are the arguments against that? And I think one of the most powerful arguments is that physics seems to apply everywhere, right? We have this universality of physics, which really goes back to Newton. Newton looking at the apple or thinking about gravity and imagining, oh, maybe gravity doesn't just apply here on Earth, it applies also in the heavens, right? He takes the physics that we deduce, these tiny little apes on this little rock, and applies it to the cosmos. And that's such a huge leap, right? It's incredible to think that the laws of physics

• 25:11Daniel Whiteson?

  we're writing down on pieces of paper, never having left this planet, really, with a very small number of exceptions, very nearby, could apply to things happening across the universe. And that might sound like hubris, right? But it's also totally backed by data. Like, we can look at distant galaxies in the telescope and we can see they are following basically the same rules of physics. We can understand what's happening there, back in time and far away.

• 25:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, it's funny, hubris was exactly the word that was rolling around in my brain. Way to preempt Kelly's critique.

• 25:43Daniel Whiteson?

  And there's a really fantastic example of this, which is very recent, maybe people heard about, this validation of Hawking's area theorem. Hawking was thinking about black holes and how they come together, and he applied the laws of thermodynamics. Thermodynamics, of course, having its origins in like 18th century dudes in essentially steampunk outfits playing with gas and valves and engines, right?

• 26:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm in.

• 26:06Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, and they were thinking about heat and energy transfer, and they figured out some cool stuff. And Hawking said, oh, let's apply this to black holes. And he came up with this theorem about how black holes merge. And because black holes have entropy, when black holes come together, he said, well, the merger of the two black holes have to result in a black hole that's bigger than the sum of the two initial areas, because the area of the black hole is connected to its entropy. And we just saw this happen with this direct validation of Hawking's area theorem. So you have this direct line from like dudes with gas flasks to like black holes a billion light years away. It really is incredible that the laws of physics we figure out here seem to apply everywhere. And so we have this, you know, Newton's leap to the cosmos.

• 26:51Daniel Whiteson?

  And then Carl Sagan and folks make another leap. Carl Sagan, when asked, do you think that aliens do physics and math the same way we do? He said, quote, "Yes, and the reason I think that's likely is that they live in the same universe as we, so they must deal with the same laws of physics and chemistry and astronomy as we." So this is Carl Sagan, who of course, you know, I hesitate to disagree with on anything because smart dude, fantastic science communicator, right?

• 27:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  The best, maybe.

• 27:21Daniel Whiteson?

  I wanna, but I wanna underline that he's making a second leap there, even bigger than Newton's leap to apply the laws of physics across the heavens. He's saying that because the laws of physics that we have to do seem to work everywhere, they must be discovered the same way everywhere or thought of the same way everywhere. And that's really a step beyond, right? I wanna separate those two for people because I think a lot of people conflate those two arguments, that just because the laws of physics apply everywhere, our description of the laws of physics apply everywhere, doesn't mean it's the only way to describe them.

• 27:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  So would there ever be a way that you could convince yourself, we have found the explanation? Or is it just like a continuous process of testing your theories over and over and over and over again and being willing to get rid of them if they're wrong, but never knowing 100% for sure if they're totally right until the aliens come?

• 28:11Daniel Whiteson?

  I don't think you can know 100% for sure if they're right, even after the aliens come. I mean, say the aliens show up and, you know, they do physics the same way we have and they follow the same path and they figured out the answers and they're just like, you know, the simplest possible scenario, they're a thousand years ahead of us. That doesn't mean that it's the only way to do it, right? Even if five different groups of aliens show up and they're all doing quantum field theory, that doesn't mean that it's the only way. Maybe we're all affected by having the same evolutionary history or the same conditions or something. There could always be another way to think about it that we don't know. And so even having the aliens show up, I don't think is conclusive.

• 28:50Daniel Whiteson?

  I think one way to approach this is to think about how close the map matches the territory. Right. So this is a question of accuracy. And another argument people feel very strongly about is that our human physics must be true, must be real because it works so darn well. Right. It's not just like some fuzzy description of the territory. Right. It's like, wow, bang on. And, you know, we talked on this podcast a lot of times about the incredible power of the standard model of particle physics. But, you know, just to highlight it, like, we can predict how particles interact and sit down and do pages and pages and pages of calculations and predict some measurement experimentalists will try to do to like 10 decimal places.

• 29:35Daniel Whiteson?

  And then the experimentalists go out and they make these measurements. And it's like, this is amazing science on both sides. Like the theoretical calculation takes so much work and careful thought. The experiment to measure something so precisely is really difficult, requires very different skills, but the two numbers agree. And when you have a theory that predicts something to 10 decimal places, oh, you're tempted to make that leap and to say, yeah, this isn't a description. This is a revelation, you know? This is like, we have found the source code of the universe. And I remember thinking that as like a junior in quantum mechanics at Rice, hearing about these experiments and seeing them compared to the theory and feeling like there's no way this is just a description. We have really pulled back a veil on nature.

• 30:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. And that's a very inspiring idea. I love that. But then you look and you're like, oh, wait a minute. But we don't know how to reconcile quantum mechanics and all this other, with all the other stuff. And so like, you know, I, how would I want to say there?

• 30:38Daniel Whiteson?

  You want to just generally go, hmm, have you guys really figured it out?

• 30:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I think maybe you all have figured a lot of things out. And truth be told, I'm very impressed by what you all have figured out. But, you know, so you can, you can look at all the things you have figured out, but there's still things that don't fit together the way that you would expect them to, which could mean that there's some other theory out there that would explain all of that stuff that hasn't been found yet, which we were talking to Ethan Segal about the other day, I think.

• 31:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, and that's the incredible puzzle of physics, that quantum mechanics is super duper accurate in scenarios where you can ignore gravity, like particle collisions or interactions, right? Because gravity is so weak at the particle level. And also general relativity, a classical theory that ignores quantum mechanics is super duper accurate in scenarios where you ignore quantum mechanics, so like black hole mergers and gravitational waves and the orbit of Mercury and, you know, ring down of binary pulsars and frame dragging as measured in space with these super duper precise balls that spin in gyroscopes and satellites. It's amazing how accurate general relativity is also. So you could make the same argument for general relativity. So like, wow, this has got to be reality, right?

• 31:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Because it's so correct that every test we've ever done of general relativity has been bang on completely accurate. And it leaves you with the impression like, wow, this is also the truth. But you make the point like you can't have two truths, especially if they disagree with each other. And these two don't agree. They don't agree not only on what's happening out there in the universe, like what's the story, you know, what's reality? What's really running the machinery? They also don't agree about what is gonna happen. They make conflicting predictions about what's inside a black hole or how the universe began or how it's all gonna end in frustratingly places we can't test. We can't do experiments to reconcile yet. But you're right, and that points to a problem with this argument, right?

• 32:31Daniel Whiteson?

  We have these very precise theories, but all of these theories are what we call effective. None of them, we think, are actually describing the real truth of the universe. We think that all of our theories are describing this. Process we call emergence. If you think that there is a real truth out there that microscopically, the universe has something happening and that our experience somehow bubbles out of that. Right? Well, there's this incredible step there, this amazing feature of the universe that we don't have to know how the universe works at the microscopic level, its fundamental base layer of reality in order to start doing science at the macroscopic level.

• 33:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Because this magic happens where when you zoom out from the microscopic to the macroscopic, the rules are different and somehow simple. Right? Like the universe, imagine it's filled with these tiny buzzing strings or flings or whatever springs, you know, is at the base layer of reality. And imagine you have no idea how that works, right? Still, somehow you can zoom out and you can describe how a baseball flies across your backyard with simple mathematics. Why is that possible? Right? Why isn't it all just chaos from the bottom up? The way like we can't describe hurricanes using simple mathematics because it's a bunch of raindrops and doing all sorts of complicated things.

• 33:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Why doesn't the same thing hold for zooming out from the fundamental layer of reality? We don't know.

• 34:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Is it just too many moving pieces? Like you could maybe predict what, you know, two raindrops are going to do, but not a whole hurricane. And you can predict throwing a ball because that's, there's a limited number of things acting on that. But the more complicated it gets, the more we're like, ah.

• 34:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. Sometimes simplicity emerges, right? And sometimes it doesn't. And when it doesn't, the reason is chaos. Like you have two raindrops, you can maybe describe it. You have 10 to the 20 raindrops, there's too many interactions and the outcome is very sensitive to how those raindrops started, the direction they were going and no simplicity emerges. It just gets more and more complicated as you add raindrops. But sometimes simplicity does emerge. You have 10 to the 26 particles moving across your backyard. They pull together and they follow a simple parabola. Hurricanes don't follow simple parabolas. And so because we don't understand why it ever happens, right? And why it doesn't always happen?

• 34:59Daniel Whiteson?

  That tells us that we're not sure if it's a part of the universe. Like, is the fact that we can attack the questions of the universe and make some progress at some levels without knowing what's going on underneath, and we can make chicken soup without knowing quantum gravity? Is that because that's just how the universe is? Simplicity emerges, and we'll figure that out, why that is at some point? Or is it part of our minds? Is it the way that we understand and filter the universe? Is it some selection we're making that we're like, we're gonna choose this thing to focus on, ask questions and do science, and we're gonna choose that thing? Is it an interplay between our brains and the universe? Or is it only part of the universe? And that's the kind of question we could answer if we had alien brains, right?

• 35:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Which work differently, and maybe they saw different things emerging, or maybe they saw the same. We just don't know where the line is between the human and the universe.

• 35:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Alternative idea, we put a ton of money into trying to make bats which echolocate and bees which see in more colors. We try to make all of them have advanced intelligence and then see what they come up with, because now we'll have different ways of looking at the world, and we've discovered that biology needs more money, for physics sake.

• 36:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, I see, right? Yes, okay. In the end, it's all just a scheme.

• 36:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 36:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Nice, for big biology.

• 36:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm schemey. Okay, so is the idea here then that like, if we could dig down and understand everything at exactly the base level, and then we could scale up and understand the hurricane, would that make us feel like we had discovered something? Or would we still just be inventing because we just managed to describe what happened? Instead of necessarily knowing why?

• 36:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, great question, and that's the temptation. And, you know, I'm a particle physicist, that's my goal. It's like, I wanna drill all the way down to the base layer of reality and find out, what are the bits there? Because philosophically, that feels like that's a moment of possible revelation. You force the universe to tell you, okay, I'm naked now, here are all my basic components. Now you've seen the reality of how things work. Everything else, how things come together and make baseballs and marching bands, whatever, you know, that's more complex science. That's basically chemistry. But you know, the fundamental physics is about the fundamental things in the universe. So yeah, if we drilled all the way down to those, wouldn't we have those in common with aliens? Couldn't we avoid all these questions of like, what's emergent and why?

• 37:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, the problem with that is we don't know if there is a fundamental layer. You know, I think about our theories as sort of like a tower. We have this tower of effective theories at different scales, like zoom all the way out. We have like theories about how galaxies work. Zoom a little bit in, you have theories about how planets form. Zoom a little bit more in, you have like classical physics of the everyday. Zoom even more, you have chemistry. Zoom even more, you have physics. Zoom even more, you have particle physics. You could keep zooming and at every level, we have a theory. Do we know that there is a foundational truth, like a base layer to reality? We haven't found it, right?

• 37:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  We just got to get to the Planck scale.

• 38:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, we definitely got to keep going. But the problem is, number one, we have no guarantee that there is a fundamental layer. And I hear this all the time. Planck scale is the pixel of reality and Elon Musk likes to say it. And it's sort of out there in the popular science world that we somehow know that the Planck scale is the layer, the finest grain we have of reality. And that's just fundamentally a misunderstanding. The Planck scale is the point where we can no longer ignore gravity when we do our quantum mechanical calculations, because things are so hot and so dense. And we can no longer ignore quantum mechanics when we do our gravity calculations, because things are so small and the particles are now relevant. And so it's just the point beyond which we can no longer calculate.

• 38:47Daniel Whiteson?

  It's sort of like an intellectual horizon, right? We don't know anything about what's below the Planck scale. And remember, the Planck scale is not even like a solid estimate of these things. It's just like, let's take a bunch of constants and mush them together until we get a distance. That's not like a reliable way to estimate things. It's what you do when you have no idea how to answer a question on a test. You're like, I'm just going to guess the units and see what numbers I can mush together to get the right units. And maybe this is close. I hope it's within a factor of a hundred or a thousand. So the Planck scale is no guarantee that the universe has a fundamental layer. And if you talk to philosophers, they think it's just as likely to the universe is what they call gunky, right?

• 39:30Daniel Whiteson?

  That everything is made of something smaller. Nothing is made of itself. And immediately like, what? Come on. How could that possibly be? But actually, if you think about it, it's the more natural explanation. Everything we've ever seen has been made of something else. So why would we expect there to be something which is just made of itself? It feels sort of like, you know, the cause that needs no cause. You know, it's a bizarre philosophical construct. And we assume it's natural, even though we've never seen it in the universe. So this is the kind of stuff where you really got to ask yourself, hmm, why do I accept this explanation and not that other explanation? When I have no evidence and not even really great arguments for it.

• 40:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wait, so you're saying that we might be just digging down and down and down and down ad infinitum?

• 40:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, it could be that it goes on forever, right? That it's just smaller and smaller and smaller down infinitely, right? An infinite tower of effective theories, an infinite tower of emergent phenomena. And so we can't shortcut this question by saying, we're just going to zoom down to the fundamentals and talk to the aliens about the sprawings or the springs or the schmings or whatever is down there at the fundamental layer, because we don't know that there is a fundamental layer.

• 40:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Do you think they'll stop giving out Nobel prizes eventually? If it turns out there's just like infinite fundamental layers and they're like, you know, Kelly found the 20th one, Daniel found the 25th, hooray.

• 40:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, in this scenario, you're a particle physicist who's discovered some fundamental layer of reality? Love that. Welcome aboard.

• 41:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm a biologist, man. I can do anything. Thanks.

• 41:05Daniel Whiteson?

  After you win the Olympics, right? And I'm going to hang this Nobel next to my Olympic gold medal. Wow. Wait, has there ever been anybody who won an Olympic medal and a Nobel Prize?

• 41:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, Philip Noel Baker is the only person who has won both an Olympic medal and a Nobel Prize.

• 41:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Amazing.

• 41:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  It was for a race in the 1920s Summer Olympics. I mean, things were easier then.

• 41:31Daniel Whiteson?

  That's an incredible achievement. Congrats, dude.

• 41:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think he's passed away.

• 41:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so it could be that particle physics is just a big grift for infinite Nobel prizes.

• 41:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes.

• 41:44Daniel Whiteson?

  That's the answer to your question.

• 41:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, great. Okay.

• 41:46Daniel Whiteson?

  You forced me to reveal that on air. Thank you.

• 41:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Amazing. Amazing. Well, yeah, good. My work here is done. All right. On the next episode. No.

• 41:56Daniel Whiteson?

  So now imagine, right, we have this tower of effective theories that we use to describe science. We have chemistry, we have physics, we have particle physics, we have subatomic particle physics. And the question then is like, well, if there's no firmament in which to ground these things, and we don't know why these things seem to emerge to allow us to explain them, why they're not just like totally intractable, then do we know if aliens would or wouldn't find the same tower of effective theories? Like, you know, the skeptic in you might say, well, look, you know, planets are obviously a thing. Aliens are going to think about planets, you know, orbiting stars. Like, let's not get ahead of ourselves and get too deep in the philosophy that we imagine that like

• 42:38Daniel Whiteson?

  aliens don't observe planets and come up with Kepler's laws, right? That's a, I think that's like an intuitive argument people might make to feel like aliens are going to see the same stuff as we.

• 42:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  But they're probably going to call it Zor Black's laws or something, you know?

• 42:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. And that might be, right? And I don't want to say that that's impossible. But I do want to open your mind maybe a little bit to the possibility that they wouldn't see planets. Think about why we think about planets. And does it actually make sense to think about planets? Because in reality, the solar system is a big spectrum of stuff. You know, you have the sun, and then you've got a bunch of other little blobs. And those blobs go all the way from Jupiter down to dust specks. And humans, we like to categorize things, right? We like to say this is A, and this is B. And historically, we saw a few different kinds of things. And so we started making boxes. But also, we've seen over time that those boxes don't really make sense. That our categories of stuff are sort

• 43:36Daniel Whiteson?

  of arbitrary dotted lines that we draw around things. And not just randomly, we draw those arbitrary dotted lines in a way to make ourselves more important. This whole concept of planets. We argued with Phil Metzger about it recently on the podcast. Does it even make sense to have this category? It's obvious to me because this category has become so baroque. You know, they have to add so many qualifiers. It has to have cleared its path. It has to be gravitationally round. They're reverse engineering this category because we like it. We want there to be a special category of things that seem important and that are relevant to us. But if you're going to take like a hard, objective, scientific eye to the solar system, you might never come up with this special category of planets.

• 44:19Daniel Whiteson?

  You might just think about the whole spectrum of things and not focus on Earth-like things at all.

• 44:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  So would you argue that definitions are? I mean, they're certainly invented.

• 44:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 44:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Is a definition ever discovering the nature of the universe? I guess it's always just our way of grappling with stuff.

• 44:37Daniel Whiteson?

  I think definitions are helpful, but categories are often very arbitrary and lead you down the wrong path. And make you think something is special or something is different when in reality, there's a spectrum. You know, think about gender, think about like, you know, the platypus, right? Which is like, what? And these categories, they're helpful for organizing your thoughts, but you got to remember that there are things we impose on the universe. They're not always things that emerge naturally from the universe. And that's the point I want to make is that even things that we feel like we are just observing have a lot of our cultural bias in them. I mean, think about the way we represent the solar system when we draw it out, right? Like, it's not representative at all. We take the planets and we like magnify them by huge numbers to make them relevant,

• 45:22Daniel Whiteson?

  when in reality, they're pretty irrelevant. The solar system is basically the sun plus a few drops of gas, right? So it's obvious once you drill into it that there's a lot of humanity in our choices of what to study and think about in the universe. And so it might be that aliens have made different choices, that they like, they grew up in the atmosphere of a star and they're like planets, schmanites, who cares? Or maybe they evolved in a subsurface ocean on a moon. And so to them, like, who cares at all about planets? Maybe they think about things fundamentally differently.

• 45:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, let's take a break. And when we get back, we will answer the simple question of whether or not there is a truth at all.

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• 46:40Speaker 15

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by breakout singer-songwriter Alex Warren.

• 47:00Speaker 17

  To this day, Ordinary would not have done anything, and I would have not been able to put it out if Book Talk didn't back it up and if my wife and her friend didn't back it up.

• 47:08Speaker 15

  Amazing.

• 47:09Speaker 17

  Pretty crazy how like, just one thing.

• 47:12Speaker 15

  Right.

• 47:12Speaker 17

  I mean, I bet we could point to nine different things in our careers where it's just one thing, all of a sudden, if that one thing didn't happen, then I wouldn't be here.

• 47:19Speaker 15

  What you're talking about right now is what I've been talking about since the beginning of my career. There's these things outside of you that make everything happen. These other forces somehow came into contact with each other and helped propel you to this place.

• 47:37Speaker 17

  It's just insane.

• 47:38Speaker 15

  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 47:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we're back, and we are about to answer, you know, the only question that really matters, which is, is there truth at all? And the good news is, Daniel's thought a lot about this, and now we're gonna know.

• 48:09Daniel Whiteson?

  Right. Yes, we're just going to wrap up a millennia old philosophical conversation here on the pod today. So so far, we've been talking as part of the larger question of like, is physics discovered or invented? We've been asking like, could you have several maps of the same territory? But it always in that sense assumes that there is a territory, that there is fundamentally something that's going on. I heard the sentiment in the listeners responses, right? Well, maybe our description of the universe is human, but there's something going on. And so let's question that assumption, like, how do we know that there really is something going on out there in the universe? One truth, whether or not we're discovering it or describing it or approximating it, right? How do we know that there really is something that's going on out there?

• 48:54Daniel Whiteson?

  And when I first started digging into this, I thought, well, of course there is, right? Something is happening in the universe and there has to be a reason why stuff happens, right? But not surprisingly, philosophers have responses to that and they've thought about ways that might not be true. Because remember that all of our descriptions of the universe, they are approximate, right? Because we can't do the really complicated calculations, like we talked about earlier. We can describe a couple of raindrops, we can't describe the hurricane. Or we can't describe like a bunch of hurricanes smashing into each other or really complicated situations. There's always going to be something that we cannot describe because all of our laws are approximate, right? They only apply in certain situations, like, for example, take fluid dynamics, right?

• 49:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Fluid dynamics works really well. It helps you think about how water flows down pipes. But we know, number one, it's not a fundamental description of the universe, right? Because it's a description of an emergent phenomena. But number two, it's only valid in certain situations. You freeze that water, you're no longer going to apply fluid dynamics. You turn it into steam, you're no longer going to apply fluid dynamics. In that same way, everything we can do about the universe has boundaries where it's relevant, right? And you go beyond those boundaries, you can no longer use your fluid dynamics or your chemistry. Even fundamental physics, right? Quantum mechanics and gravity are only relevant down to the Planck scale. And beyond that, who knows where the laws of physics are?

• 50:21Daniel Whiteson?

  So there's a school of philosophy that says, hmm, how do we know there are laws of physics beyond those boundaries? Maybe instead of imagining that we have this patchwork of theories that eventually we could stitch together to describe the truth. Maybe between those patches, there's nothing.

• 50:39Daniel Whiteson?

  So Nancy Cartwright wrote this book called How the Laws of Physics Lie. We were like, wow, bold title, right?

• 50:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 50:48Daniel Whiteson?

  And she imagines a universe where between these patches, where things get complicated, that maybe what happens, happens by hap, that's her phrase, that there is no fundamental rule. And, you know, every instinct in me, every fiber of my being says, no, that's crazy. Right? The universe follows laws. And but then I ask, well, hmm, how do I know that exactly? I only know that because it seems to work in simple situations where I can set up a simplified experiment and I can do a calculation to predict it. And that's really what experiments are. It's ways you've like tricked the universe into only doing something simple enough that we can calculate it.

• 51:30Daniel Whiteson?

  That's the whole job of experimental physics is to concoct these artificial scenarios where things are simple enough for us to predict. Most of the stuff that happens in the universe, from, you know, like tiny particles to hurricanes to even like the leaves swirling outside my office, we could never hope to calculate. So how do we know that it follows rules? If you're going to be a skeptic about it, you gotta say like, hmm, I guess we actually don't know, right? It could be that when things get complicated, there aren't laws that are being followed. And I don't believe that, but I don't have a scientific reason to not believe it.

• 52:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  And my brain has trouble wrapping itself around how that could possibly be true, but that might be the limit of my imagination.

• 52:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, and I think even Nancy Cartwright probably doesn't like believe this in her soul, but it's a very valuable exercise to think, well, is it possible for the universe to be different from what we expect at some deep fundamental way? Because historically, we've seen that happen, right? The universe turns out it violates lots of our intuition, you know, the way things operate near the speed of light or microscopically, the fact that cause and effect has a stochastic element to it. These things, we would have been rejected out of hand, right? Initially, like, that's crazy. There's no way the universe works that way. And yet it does. And so we do need to be prepared to have our minds. Blown. And that's the whole joy of this exercise is to imagine like, what if aliens show up and they tell us the universe is really fundamentally different from the way

• 52:58Daniel Whiteson?

  that we expect. That's why we want the aliens to show up, to shock us, to reveal an amazing, mind blowing truth. And yeah, it'd be kind of disappointing to discover that the laws of physics only apply in simplified situations. And beyond that, there is this darkness, right? Where the universe doesn't follow laws, but we don't know that it's not true.

• 53:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Feel like if the aliens came and they were like, nah, you guys are totally wrong. Like, I mean, it would be, wouldn't it be decades before you could convince yourself that they were right instead? Would you like, if the alien said, Daniel, you're wrong, would you just be like, all right, I'm throwing away everything we know. The alien said so, and I'm a super fan.

• 53:36Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, that's a really fun question. So in the book, I actually imagine a bunch of different alien contact scenarios. And one of them is that exact one, the aliens show up and have a competing theory of physics. And in that hypothetical example, I imagine that some humans are like, oh, you know, our theory never made sense to me. I really like this alien idea. And they go over to the alien camp and some aliens are like, oh, you know what? I really prefer the human way. And like, people have different ways of thinking, the way that some people need to see something written out, and other people need to hear it, or some people need to play with something, right? There's different kinds of learners. So maybe some people will find the alien description of the universe more intuitive and easier to play with. And other people will feel the opposite. It'd be fascinating how that breaks out.

• 54:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, it would. I hope I'm alive to see it.

• 54:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Another objection people make to the idea that we could be getting physics all wrong, or that physics could have a lot of humanity into it, is the idea that you raised at the beginning of the episode, you know, what if we have a bunch of data and it describes the universe? Doesn't that tell us that our theory is right? And this is this question of uniqueness, right? Do we know that there has to be one explanation for the universe? And earlier, we were giving the examples of having a superseded theory, like, well, maybe you have a theory and it works for now, but then later you get more data. So you got to toss out that theory. For a new one. That's cool. And that's almost certainly what we're doing today. Right. In the future, we'll have a theory of quantum gravity that tells us a different story about what's happening in the universe than any of the stories we have now.

• 55:11Daniel Whiteson?

  So we'll toss out our whole explanation for what's really out there and come up with a new one. Cool. But what if we find the fundamental layer of reality? We discover it and we explain it. And we have a theory that works perfectly. It incorporates dark energy and dark matter and the expansion and everything. And all of our questions are answered. And it tells us this beautiful story about what's happening. Then aliens show up. Could they have a different theory that explains the same experiments? Could they have done the same experiments, made the same observations, but draw a different line through the same data points? The answer is philosophically, yeah, maybe. Because you'll never have infinite data. And even if you did, you could always still draw two different curves. Right? Just imagine like plotting a bunch of points on a piece of paper.

• 55:55Daniel Whiteson?

  How many curves could you draw through those points? An infinite number, right? Make the curve as complex as you like. You can draw an infinite number. And so we never really know if our explanation is the only one. And this is something philosophers are deeply debating. Like, there's a bunch of philosophers who say, look, if you have another theory that explains the data equally well, it's gotta be equivalent. You know, it's gotta be like the same theory dressed in different clothes. And they point to good examples like we used to have a wave theory of quantum mechanics and a matrix theory of quantum mechanics, each derived by a different German guy. And those two guys disliked each other and called each other's theories crap. And then later, John von Neumann brought them together and said, look, guys, these are actually the same theory.

• 56:40Daniel Whiteson?

  I can draw connections between them and prove it. Or we used to have a bunch of different string theories until Ed Witten showed they're actually just extreme points of the same M theory. Right? Or we have like Hamiltonian mechanics and Lagrangian mechanics, two different ways to think about complex physics that are fundamentally the same. So isn't it just like that? Maybe the aliens have a different description, but you know, you can make connections. We don't know. Right? We don't know if every theory has to be that way. And another group of philosophers say. There might be another explanation that it's possible to have another theory of physics that doesn't map over, that is conceptually different to our theory. But we don't know, right? We don't have that theory. We don't have a recipe for building this alternate theory. So it's just like a speculation.

• 57:25Daniel Whiteson?

  It's an argument we don't know how to defeat, which means it might be possible.

• 57:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so if we ended up discovering a theory of everything and we felt like we had it all figured out.

• 57:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 57:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  I was gonna ask you if you would put up a giant billboard saying, never mind, aliens, we got it all figured out. But what you're saying is you'd be interested to see if they had a different way to describe everything. But some philosophers would say, well, that doesn't really matter because it's fundamentally gonna be the same theory, even if it's wearing different clothes.

• 57:55Daniel Whiteson?

  There is no scenario in which I'm putting up a billboard saying, aliens, never mind. No scenario. But yeah, if we have a theory of everything and they show up and they have a different theory of everything, then that's fascinating, right? Because even if it is fundamentally the same, you're still learning something mathematically or philosophically. And if it's fundamentally different, if you can't make a connection between the two, boom, that tells you something mind blowing about the universe, that you could have two different maps of the same territory that both work, then like, is there really a territory? What does that say about our sense that there is an objective, physical reality that's out there, that doing things, following some laws that we're figuring out? Like, maybe that's not the case.

• 58:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Maybe things are more complicated or weirder than we imagined. So I'm always in the camp of hoping for the weird, surprising outcome.

• 58:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel, I really hope you get your aliens one day.

• 58:51Daniel Whiteson?

  I hope I do, and I hope that they don't nuke us from space before they tell us the answers to all of these questions.

• 58:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  You are a weird one, Daniel.

• 59:00Daniel Whiteson?

  And this is just a taste of all the concepts we describe in the book, Do Aliens Speak Physics, where we do a really deep dive into these questions. It also includes a bunch of really fun cartoons from my friend Andy Warner, who helped me write the book, and little hypothetical case studies to examine concrete scenarios where aliens could show up and be weirdly different in ways you might not expect. So if you enjoy these questions and enjoy this conversation, there's lots more in the book. Go check it out. Do Aliens Speak Physics? You can get it at www.alienspeakphysics.com.

• 59:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I think if aliens do come to visit the US, this book is gonna be the first thing they grab.

• 59:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Travel across the cosmos for this book? Totally makes sense. Worth doing.

• 59:43Daniel Whiteson?

  I hope they're not offended by our depictions.

• 59:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you.

• 59:58Daniel Whiteson?

  We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe.

• 1:00:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.

• 1:00:11Daniel Whiteson?

  We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at [email protected].

• 1:00:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D and K Universe.

• 1:00:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

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