Do Aliens Speak Physics, with Andy Warner

Daniel and Kelly are joined by Andy Warner, the co-author and illustrator of Daniel's new book, Do Aliens Speak Physics, and talk about how we might chat about science with aliens. 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?

  Let's talk about fantasies. Scientific fantasies, of course. Because every scientist out there has got one. A dream scenario in which they discover something that shocks the world, or they stumble across some new species or an ancient artifact. If you've been listening to this podcast, then you can guess my scientific fantasy. It's, of course, first contact. I want to meet the aliens. But wait, you might think, Daniel's no biotic. We know that, and he's admitted to having no knack for chemistry either. So what's Daniel's scientific interest in aliens? Well, the reason I got into physics was because I thought the topic was bigger than biology or chemistry.

• 2:25Daniel Whiteson?

  It doesn't try to solve just the puzzles of life here on Earth, which might only be relevant to life on Earth. Physics tries to understand the laws of the whole universe. Its questions are so much bigger, they literally span the whole cosmos. How did the universe begin? What is it made out of? So alien contact is my scientific fantasy because I long believe that physics is something that should be cross planetary and cross species. I believe that somewhere out there was an alien Daniel working on particle physics, and I'd like to meet him and to make a mental connection over our common interest in the mysteries of the universe. Physicists don't need any bigger egos, but it's quite a boost to think that you're studying

• 3:10Daniel Whiteson?

  something that could be the topic of a galactic science conference. But is that just fantasy? Or is it on solid ground? Could it actually happen? I just wrote a book exploring this juicy topic. The book is called Do Aliens Speak Physics? And it's out now. Please pick up a copy. Today's episode is just a little taste of what the book dives into. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Alien Universe.

• 3:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Weinersmith. I study parasites and space, and I am so excited that I finally get to meet Andy Warner on today's show.

• 3:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I want to meet aliens and talk to them about the nature of the universe, or find out that they're bored by that question. Either one, I'm excited about it.

• 4:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel, none of us are surprised to find out that you want to meet aliens. So, so here's my question, since we are chatting with an amazing cartoonist today. Do you have any artistic skills at all? Where, where do you stand on the art spectrum?

• 4:22Daniel Whiteson?

  I do do a lot of doodles, actually. They're embarrassing, so I would never show them to anybody, but I do enjoy doodling. I used to play this game with Hazel where she would pick a random object and then we would both draw it without looking at each other's page and then compare. And you learn a lot about like how people imagine things and how they portray things. It's a lot of fun. And for this book, I did a bunch of doodles. Sometimes you're trying to explain an idea and you need the visuals. And so I would do what are kind of embarrassing, basic drawings to share with Andy. And then he would come back and he's like, oh, you're talking about this? And he would do this incredible sketch, uh, which really just captured all the ideas and conveyed them beautifully. So, yeah, I'm a big fan of art. I do a little bit of art, but it's all private art. I would never show it to anybody, except for my close collaborators.

• 5:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Excellent. My art skills are like, I don't even get the proportions right on stick figures. I am awful. And it was so embarrassing because I took parasitology and we were supposed to draw what we saw underneath the microscope.

• 5:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 5:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  And that was a big part of our grade.

• 5:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, wow.

• 5:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  And all of my parasites were just blobs. This blob has a uterus over here that I put an arrow towards and like, you just have to believe it was there. And, and then it got worse because I married an artist and at one point he was like, well, let me teach you how to draw. And I realized that I had just decided, well, I don't need to know anymore. Because this is your job now.

• 5:41Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, right.

• 5:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I'm offloading this to you. And so.

• 5:45Daniel Whiteson?

  I got the fish stuff covered. You got the drawing stuff covered.

• 5:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. Equal distribution of labor. But luckily you and I found people to work with who are good artists.

• 5:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Absolutely, yes. It's a joy to collaborate with artists, isn't it?

• 5:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  It is. It really is. I mean, especially because I think you and I really like to dig deep into topics and really get into the details and it's hard for people to follow you on that journey sometimes. And partly it's hard for them to follow, you know, one, because it's complicated material, but two, sometimes it just gets kind of exhausting.

• 6:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 6:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  To be like. Trying to understand complicated topics for too long. And so it's nice, one, to have an illustration that clearly shows it, in case you're not imagining it right in your head. And two, to give you a second to laugh and be like, huh, okay. And you know, if you get the joke because you got the science, that feels good, too. It's like a nice payoff, you know? And then also, like, I love that artists will show me that they're, you know, seeing things in a different way than I am, and it makes me think about things differently. And anyway, it's a lot of fun.

• 6:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, and it's one reason why, like, this podcast is fun, because it's not just like one person talking about science. It's a conversation, and you help me explain the physics, then I help you explain the biology. And, you know, there's a back and forth there. And in these books, where you have like a scientist and a cartoonist, there's also a back and forth between the dialogue, the written word, and the cartoons, right? They make fun of each other, they refer to each other. And you're right, that's much more interesting and relaxing, because you need those little breaks, you need the back and forth. So it just doesn't seem like such a monologue.

• 7:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep, absolutely. Well, today, we're going to hear a little bit more about this process. Andy's going to describe what it was like, so we don't just have to take your word for it. And we'll hear what it's like for the poor cartoonists working with us. And so today, we're talking about your book, Do Aliens Speak Physics?

• 7:28Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right.

• 7:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  The greatest book ever, sure to be a New York Times bestseller, now available in all fine bookstores. And so we asked our audience to get this conversation started. Can we use physics to communicate with aliens? And let's see what our audience thinks, given that Daniel talks about this all the time. And we always love hearing about it.

• 7:52Speaker 06

  Physics is the basis of absolutely everything. We can't have a conversation just between two people without physics. So absolutely, physics is the only way we could communicate with aliens.

• 8:01Speaker 07

  Physics and math are probably the most universal languages. So I would say probably, yes. I think that if we make an experiment where the outcome is different from what the aliens expect, that would be interesting. What else would you like to use? Magic or, worse, chemistry?

• 8:20Speaker 02

  General relativity and the speed of light mean our conversations are more likely penpal exchanges over centuries than a phone call. I'm actually of the mind that we probably never will encounter aliens. I'm pretty sure if we contact aliens, physics will be involved in some way or another. I don't see how it couldn't be. I would think so, because the only thing I can think of is using the band. Of the electromagnetic spectrum to encode or entangle to send out communications. I don't know if we can use physics to talk to aliens, but if you figure it out, please let me know because I'm pretty sure my stepmother is an alien and she is impossible to communicate with.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Yes, because there must be some values or formulas which are universal. And we could base our communication on that. Communication requires some kind of shared experience or viewpoint, and I think physics could provide that, yeah. Because the distances are so great that they exceed human lifetimes, can we even use physicists? I think we can and probably should. We can depict things like one thing and another thing equals two things numerically. And then we can display the Pythagorean theorem. Once we get the units of measurement figured out, yeah, using physics to talk to aliens would probably work. It's the one common thing that we can discuss.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  This is how fast light goes, and then that gives us their units of measurement and we figure it all out and everything's wonderful. I'd rather a physicist was doing the talking rather than a politician. But it's obvious that the best scenario for humanity would be to let me moderate. I think so. In fact, I think we're using basic physics on the Voyager probes, the records that will allow us to, you know, and not communicate directly, but at least give an alien civilization a starting point on how to communicate with us.

• 10:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  As always, amazing answers. I had a good laugh at the stepmom comment.

• 10:27Daniel Whiteson?

  And the chemistry joke, of course.

• 10:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  And the chemistry joke, of course, yep. But this is a question you have thought about a lot. And your co-author Andy has thought about a lot, so maybe we should just jump right in and hear more about it.

• 10:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay, so then it's my absolute pleasure to welcome my co-author and collaborator and new favorite cartoonist to the podcast, Andy Warner. Andy is a nonfiction cartoonist. He's the author of the New York Times bestselling and hilarious book, Brief Histories of Everyday Objects. He was a contributing editor at the NIB and teaches cartooning at the California College of the Arts at Stanford and at the Animation Workshop in Denmark. He works in South Berkeley and comes from the sea.

• 11:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  What does that mean, Andy? What does it mean to come from the sea?

• 11:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I actually, I grew up on a series of small islands. First, San Blas in Panama, then St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands. That's where my sister was born. And then I also spent a lot of time in Corsica. My dad is a marine biologist, or was, he's retired now. And he studied sex-changing fish while I was growing up. So for a summer job, sometimes I would be floating above a reef with a snorkel, counting off how many blue-headed wrasse there were. And there was always tubs out back where he and various post-docs were removing their gonads. It was a fun childhood. Yeah, I have two siblings, and so we kind of grew up running around on these islands.

• 11:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  I was a fish person when I was a baby scientist, and I love fish so much and blue-headed wrasse. I read all about sex-changing and what we know about the mechanisms behind that. And your childhood sounds absolutely amazing to me.

• 12:10Daniel Whiteson?

  So I didn't even need to talk to you about sneaker mails. You already know the drill.

• 12:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Totally know about sneaker mails. Old news.

• 12:17Daniel Whiteson?

  That's my party story. It's like, let me tell you about sneaker mails.

• 12:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Awesome.

• 12:21Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, it does sound like a lot of fun, but I noticed, Andy, that you didn't grow up to become a marine biologist. What does that say about your experience? Yeah, much to the sorrow of my dad. He definitely was like, he'll be the one. But you know what it did teach me is how to talk to scientists, because I grew up with him, with all the people he was working with, his friends, my parents' friends, in these somewhat isolated environments where there weren't a lot of other kids around. And so in the absence of that, I would talk to these grownups. And talking to scientists is a really interesting thing, because they are very fascinated by things. And so it taught me how to be interested in things that maybe I'm not specialized in, absorb their fascination,

• 13:02Daniel Whiteson?

  get fascinated by it in a similar way. And then you go and swim, and you see these fish that they were talking to you about. And it makes the science very real. And so-

• 13:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I ended up making a lot of comics about science. I'm a non-fiction cartoonist and I do history, but I also do science interpretation. And I like to think, or at least I like to tell my dad that his, his influence is there. Well, so how did you learn to translate scientists? Cause, cause you're right with like, we as a group get really excited about stuff, but we're not always really good at explaining that to other people. You know, we like jump right to the mechanisms and we're talking about gonadotropin releasing hormone or something instead of like, yeah. How, how did you learn to communicate science to non-scientists? It's all about the asking questions, right? Like these people know things. It's not just somebody at a party blathering on about something that they know nothing about.

• 13:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  These are really specialists that have devoted their lives to, you know, maybe it's somewhat esoteric knowledge to like the general public, but like they can break it down into its little parts. And so if you just sit there with somebody and you kind of probe them and you question them. And if you don't understand something, that's what you ask about. Now that leads you into a new direction. It's that technique that really gets me a lot of places is being nice and interested in what people are talking about and then asking them questions about it, you know, not just like absorbing it. Because that also demonstrates to them that you're actually interested. A lot of people who have specialized have this experience where they talk about what they do to somebody whose eyes glaze over and they realize partway through, oh, I've lost this person.

• 14:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so just not being that person they've lost, being that person that's like, oh no, like tell me more. It's, you know, it takes you along for the ride with them. And that's been a really fun part of my entire career. I mean, even with Daniel, Daniel was explaining a ton of stuff to me. As we put this book together, it's one of my favorite parts about being the kind of cartoonist that I am, frankly.

• 14:58Daniel Whiteson?

  I love how you talk about talking to scientists, the way we think about talking to aliens, you know, as if scientists are the aliens. And so you're saying that this whole time we've been writing a book about talking to aliens, you've been practicing on me this whole time. That's awesome.

• 15:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Absolutely. Firsthand knowledge. It is really interesting because scientists are often.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  And used to talking with each other and this kind of specialized language develops. And so as a layperson, like I'm sort of a professional layperson in a lot of ways. Like I talk to people and I get them to talk to me about what they're interested in and then break it down. And yes, Daniel, you're absolutely on the examination table.

• 15:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  So I'm interested in how this collaboration came about. And so maybe Daniel, so I know Daniel is the one who initially had the idea. So maybe, Daniel, you can tell me about how you came up with this idea initially. And then we can talk about what it was like collaborating.

• 15:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so you know, I'm of course interested in physics and like, how does the universe work? And all that kind of stuff. But anybody who listens to the pod knows that I'm also really interested in philosophy and not like weird abstract philosophy, but the context of the physics questions, like, what does it mean that the universe is made of strings? Or springs or springs or whatever it's actually made out of, you know? To me, the reason physics is exciting is because of the philosophical implications of what we've learned. Space is curvy or it's not, or whatever. The universe is infinite or it's finite. All those things have meaning, but you know, they have meaning if you think you're discovering the truth. They have less meaning if you think, hmm, this is just our description of the universe. And maybe it's telling us just about ourselves and not the universe.

• 16:40Daniel Whiteson?

  I wanted to write a book about that, about figuring out, you know, is physics the map? Or is it the territory itself? Also, because a lot of physicists deeply believe that it's the territory and can't accept the concept that it's the map. And I was a little bit more skeptical. So I pitched this idea for a book to my 14 year old at the time. And he was like, hmm, boring. And I would never read that book. I know, I was totally crushed, honestly. I was like, this is my passion project, but I also really respected his honesty.

• 17:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Better than a 14 year old. Yeah.

• 17:13Daniel Whiteson?

  I know, right? Exactly. Your kids will make you humble. But then I thought, well, how can I make this more fun? Well, maybe it's more fun if you think about why it matters. You know, like, does it matter at all? Is it only of interest to philosophical interested people who smoke banana peels on the roof? And I thought, well, it matters if our description is human or if it's universal. If somebody else has a different description and like, who else might have a different description? Well, you know, alien scientists. And so it was fun to imagine what might happen when aliens arrive and we get to talk to their scientists and learn like, oh, are we describing the universe? Or is it just our description of our experience of it? And I went back to my 14 year old and I was on pins and needles. And he was like, oh yeah, I would read that book.

• 17:57Daniel Whiteson?

  And so boom, I was off to the races.

• 18:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Has he read the whole book?

• 18:02Daniel Whiteson?

  He has read the book, actually. Yeah. He and my daughter read it and they both contributed some jokes.

• 18:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's awesome.

• 18:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, I know. Katrina has not yet read the book, though. I know. Yes. She's on spouse probation for that. But, you know, I also wanted a book that was really accessible. And, you know, I know a lot about physics and you guys know that translating physics to what everybody else out there can understand is not always easy, especially when you're really close to the topic. And it's sometimes hard for me to remember like which of these concepts are intuitive and which ones are really a struggle to get over. And what is the journey to really incorporating them? So it's important to me to work with somebody who was good at translating ideas, who knew how to speak to aliens or physicists or alien physicists. And so I was a big fan of Andy's work. I knew about it already. I'd read his book, followed his comics.

• 18:53Daniel Whiteson?

  And so I just cold emailed him to see if he was up for this kind of collaboration.

• 18:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so what did you think, Andy? When Daniel pitched this alien idea, were you like, oh my gosh, a crackpot has sent me an email? Or were you like, what? This is a great idea? Well, of course I was. I was into it from the immediate second I popped up in my email inbox. I'm like,

• 19:11Speaker 02

  Hello, I'm a physicist and I want to write a book about aliens with you. It's a dream. I'm a cartoonist. As long as it wasn't like a phishing scam, I was on board.

• 19:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, it still could be. It still could be.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  It still could be. It's a really elaborate.

• 19:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. I do the long con. Yeah.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  You need those bank account details for the book tour, right?

• 19:34Speaker 02

  This is pretty standard, Kelly, in the industry. That's what I'm told.

• 19:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah. That's what I tell my husband also.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Right. A very elaborate phishing scam, that one.

• 19:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. Yes, I'm committed.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  So, yeah, I responded as quick as I could before I emailed some other cartoonist. I said, yes, of course, this sounds really interesting. Let's go on the horn and talk more about it. And so I think we did a Zoom meetup and just kind of discussed back and forth. And it immediately became apparent to me that, you know, this wasn't just a guy who was interested in aliens and knew some stuff about physics, which obviously Daniel is. But, you know, he was approaching this project using it as like a framing device, as a way to look at all these really interesting, really profound, sometimes frankly unsettling questions that are just out there in the air around us.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  And if you care to look at them, you can have a pretty crazy time digging deep into them. It's just most of the time you choose to focus on other things. And this book really digs into the fundamental pieces of how science came to be, what we consider science, the path of it. I mean, one of the things I love that Daniel brought to this with this notion of, rather than the progression of science being this sort of like path, this river moving ever forward, it's that it's this kind of, you know, it's a river system. Sure, there's progress, but there's these dead ends, these streams come out and then they rejoin. You know, it's this really braided thing, this braided object, rather than this just like path up the mountain to the peak, the summit.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  And, you know, I'm, I'm really interested in how people frame things because it's how you tell a story. It's how you get across information. And so the fact that Daniel was able Able to take this very high concept idea of the fundamental nature of the universe and marry it to this like really grabby idea of just talking to aliens. I mean, I was I was sold. And then the more we were working together, it just never wasn't fun. Which is a great thing about working on a book, you know, like there was always a new thought experiment and a new way to consider the idea, you know, like we get into our perceptions of the world. And one of the things that was fun about working with Daniel is he has a very, he's as excited to learn new things as I am. And so

• 21:58Speaker 02

  we would say, you know, we need to learn how dogs do it. We need to learn how cuttlefish do it. Like, what were the Mayans up to? And so like, there was this like exhilarating collaboration where we were just continually bouncing stuff off of each other until the book went to print, frankly.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  And, you know, and I think we got somewhere interesting with it, too. It's, it's this, it deals with pretty profound ideas in a very silly way, but that doesn't make them not profound.

• 22:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Awesome.

• 22:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. And we really wanted the book to be accessible and to be fun. Because, yeah, it does deal with pretty weighty issues, but we didn't want people to feel like this is a dry academic text about philosophy. Or even one of those like popular science books that from a great famous person that you read and you feel like I'm in the presence of great ideas, but I don't really get them. You know, those books. You know, our style is sort of like in the tradition of like your book, Kelly, A City on Mars and you know, Randall Monroe's book, What If? And like all the way back to like Logic Comics, where like you're touching on deep, abstract, philosophical, fundamental stuff, but you're making it fun and accessible. And I think the key to that is cartoons, because they are fun and they make you feel like, hey, how serious could we be anyway?

• 23:11Daniel Whiteson?

  We're like making dad jokes and there's, you know, silly drawings here. And Andy, I think, is really underselling himself because he did a lot of the translation. Like, I, you know, I tried my best to make these ideas understandable. But the way you ask great questions, Kelly, so does Andy. And he's like, what does this really mean? And I'm not getting it and keep explaining it until it makes sense. And then, of course, the cartoons really bring it together and add that note of levity that you need as a break. You know, you're like, whoa, I really swallowed a big concept here. Okay, I need to laugh, right? You know? Nobody can think hard for like 20 pages straight.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there's a reason. Why the New Yorker has gag cartoons.

• 23:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. Exactly.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Helps the medicine go down easy.

• 23:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, and you were clearly having a lot of fun with the comics, Andy. And so tell us about what was your process for like figuring out what the aliens would look like?

• 24:01Speaker 02

  I mean, I gave myself a lot of leeway because one thing that was fun about this book is that from the get go, we're just like, we have no idea what it's going to be like, like not even any guess, right? Like anybody that says they have a guess is putting you on. And so we were always interested in breaking stuff down to its constituent parts. And because we were doing that with history of science, with philosophy, I felt complete artistic license to do that with anatomy, especially goopiness, kind of dripping blobs and things like that. And so what I would try to do is just make them as different from the last one that I had drawn, which was a fun experiment. And it's very similar to how I sketch. I kind of sketch naturally these little monsters in my sketchbooks.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  And so as an outgrowth of that, it was just like, make these little monsters. Maybe this one is a floating orb. Maybe this one has a thousand limbs. Maybe this one has a bunch of eyes. What do alien eyes look like? Let's dig into that. And then, you know, what are these aliens doing? Usually they're in conversation with a human in some sort of humorous way. And that was a fun thing to me because it kind of demonstrates one of the powers of cartooning. Because the whole book is about how difficult it is to connect with aliens, right? To find this common ground. Is it even possible? Maybe it's not. And so then almost every cartoon in it is this human speaking in English in a bubble to an alien, right? It almost works counter to the concept, but because it's a cartoon, it acts instead as a commentary.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  And so often these little characters are like a little Greek chorus or something like that, where they're comedic on it, they're adding a joke, they're undercutting the authors, they're making fun of us often, and the reader just takes it in stride. It's funny to them and it then maybe hopefully deepens the experience because, you know, they're reading about aliens. You might as well get to see a few.

• 25:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Absolutely. So what was the hardest comic you had to do for the whole thing? Because I know for Zach, there's always like an image where he just can't draw the thing the right way. And so was there a particular one that you got hung up on?

• 26:06Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, a lot of the diagrams and stuff like that, Daniel, Daniel will help me with them. And that's a very fun thing is that Daniel, you know, using whatever graphics program he does, will put together these little cartoons.

• 26:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Embarrassingly kludgy.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  They're not embarrassing, Daniel. They're beautiful. And then I'll draw over them. And so having somebody around to really help me out with the kind of nuts and bolts of what I needed to get right was good. But in terms of the difficulty, I mean, I really had a lot of license because we start every chapter with sort of a science fiction fable, almost, a hypothetical scenario. And so most of the time I was drawing the comics, I was drawing aliens and humans interacting, sometimes in a fictional setting with the hypothetical scenarios. So I could get as crazy as I wanted to. You know, I wasn't like having to get every single part of a diagram right as I would. And like, say in a city on Mars, if

• 27:05Speaker 02

  you mess up the way that it looks, somebody's gonna call you out on it. Nobody saved the aliens.

• 27:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  Little bit of that happened, but that's all right.

• 27:13Daniel Whiteson?

  And that was one of my favorite moments is getting the first draft of Andy's drawings. Because, you know, we have this text we've been working on, and then it's time for him to illustrate it. And I get to be the first person to see these. And like, they always just added so much humor and levity and clarity to the work. So I was really glad for how the whole thing went. I had a great time.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  We also ended up cutting a bunch of them, too. I mean, I overdrew. We also overwrote. Oh, my God, Kelly. The original draft, was it like?

• 27:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Kelly knows because she read the first draft. She read the whole first draft. It was like two books worth. Yeah.

• 27:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  I loved it. I wish you could have kept it all. It was all great.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  We were having a lot of fun. There was like an extended sequence about Harvey Wallbangers that we really got. And true, we had to cut a lot of jokes. But we also, you know, it's, it's good, I think, in writing humor to overwrite and then cut down, you end up with a stronger product. But, you know, some of my favorite little gags ended up on the cutting room floor. But I'll always remember the aliens.

• 28:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  So how did the co-writing process work then with you two?

• 28:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, we would put together an outline just to make sure we were sort of aligned with where the book was going, what topics are we going to cover, what is the big idea? And then I would write a first draft and send it to him and he would cut a bunch of stuff and ask me questions and revise a bunch of stuff and then also add a bunch of stuff. Because Andy's not just a cartoonist, he also knows a lot about the history of science and history in general. And so he wrote a bunch of the chapters on like, you know, the path of science and where things have gone and added a bunch of wonderful details. And then we would go back and forth. And then when we thought the text was in shape, Andy would do a draft on the comics. And then I would comment on them, which meant like, wow, I love this one. No, I love this one. Ooh, this one's amazing. Ha, ha, ha, lol.

• 28:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Really sharp comments.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, you were very critical. Oh, we.

• 29:02Daniel Whiteson?

  I was trying to be, I really was. I was like, what can I add? I don't know, I could just tell him which ones I laughed at.

• 29:06Speaker 02

  It helps, it really does. It was such a collaborative process. Yeah, we, I don't know, we would go through maybe like three to four ping pong backs over each chapter. Because we ended up, again, we, you know, we would cut a bunch and then add a bunch back in. And it's hard at this point, reading through it to remember. I mean, you know, I did all the hard physics on there.

• 29:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  But aside from the stuff that I really just can't wrap my tiny little brain around, a lot of the style has sort of melded into this hybrid of Dan Andy. The fusion of our two dad joke styles. And I think we have a similar sense of humor that made it easy and a similar urge to kind of meander around. It was fun.

• 29:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Amazing. Well, thank you both for sharing information about the process of working on this. Let's take a break and when we get back, let's talk about how do we know aliens even do science?

• 30:11Speaker 01

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• 31:30Speaker 04

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• 32:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  We're back. I am grilling Dinandi. What did you say that? Yeah, yeah, okay. Dinandi about, do aliens speak physics? So let's jump into some of the the science here. So why do we even think that aliens do science?

• 32:59Daniel Whiteson?

  I think we hope that aliens do science, and that's part of just like our human projection. You know, the question of like, are we the only intelligent species in the universe? Which is an ancient question and one that resonates with everybody. The fact that we ask that question says that we think intelligence is important, right? We're not just out there looking for like slime molds on other planets. There's a specific kind of alien we want to meet, and that kind of alien is similar to us. Because the important thing about us is that we are intelligent. But also, for me, the important thing about us is that we're trying to unravel the nature of the universe, where this weird part of the universe that looks inward and tries to understand. And so I think we are very curious about whether aliens are like us.

• 33:43Daniel Whiteson?

  And so that's what we want to know, like, do they think about the universe the way that we do? But you know, part of the book is trying to make the strongest case against those assumptions. So that we can really figure out like, how do we know? And so even though there are some things that seem obvious, like, well, if aliens are technological and they figured out how to travel the stars, then obviously they must know how, you know, space works and how to bend it or how to curve it. Or how to create wormholes and they can explain it to us. But you know, that's an assumption. And so in the book, we dig into that very question like, is it actually necessary to do science, to think about the universe as a puzzle that you're trying to unravel in order to master technology that lets you navigate the stars?

• 34:28Speaker 02

  Right, and we have so many examples, even in just human history of humans developing wildly complicated technologies with very little conception of what's going into those technologies on a fundamental level, like what makes them work. We're very willing to then improve, iterate on those technologies. I mean, think about blacksmithing, metallurgy, right? I mean, it's or or bread making, you know, these, these things that are not necessarily intuitive to the human brain, we're able to harness and derive incredible complexity from with really no knowledge of how it actually works. And so that gives you this idea that maybe you could have this very technologically advanced

• 35:13Speaker 02

  alien species that just kind of iterated there and doesn't have that curiosity that makes them wonder what is the fundamental, basic part of the universe? Is there a fundamental basic? You know, maybe they just don't care. Maybe they just sort of iterated their way into warp drives and ended up on our front door and they just want to sample our food. We have all these assumptions because we got there and because we're curious in this very specific way. And one thing that we do over and over again, that's kind of fun in this book is sort of a rug pull where we get people hyped up about a possible connection. Then we say, oh, no, no, no, pull the rug out. And then we dig deep into why maybe it's a lot more complicated, a lot more difficult to connect in that way than you would assume.

• 35:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  So I've got a question for you then, Andy. So when Daniel was, you know, answering the question, it seemed pretty clear to me that what he was saying was that if he ended up on a planet and they made sourdough bread, but they didn't understand why, and that was where they maxed out, he would be really disappointed.

• 36:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  If you got to a planet and the aliens made sourdough, but didn't know why it worked, but they were, would you still be excited about meeting those aliens?

• 36:20Speaker 02

  Eat the sourdough. I mean, we actually, we have a hypothetical situation. One of our little chapter starters has this hypothetical situation where we have this group of aliens that arrives and everybody meets them and they explain some stuff and the physics meet them and you know, there is this communication and they're just not interested in what the physicists are interested in. And the physicists kind of walk away disappointed while everybody else is having a party. So we have that, we, we imagine that exact scenario where I'm kind of chilling, eating the sourdough while Daniel's weeping in a corner.

• 36:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Do you think there are going to be alien cartoonists?

• 36:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Ooh.

• 36:56Speaker 02

  No, I mean, I would say that cartooning is simply a fundamental act in the universe.

• 37:04Speaker 02

  I cannot conceive.

• 37:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Why live in a universe without cartoons? I agree.

• 37:09Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 37:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 37:11Daniel Whiteson?

  But I also want to defend myself a little bit there. I mean, I'm making it sound like our book is a bit of a wet blanket, you know, sort of like your book, Kelly.

• 37:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep. I was gonna call us the wet blankets, but now it sounds like you're trying to back out.

• 37:25Daniel Whiteson?

  No, I think the answer either way is fascinating and wonderful. Like, look, either the aliens do science the way that we do and have a lot in common with us intellectually and emotionally, because science is emotional, right? It's this curiosity that drives us. It's, it comes from within us. It's not rational. Either they are similar to us in that way, in which case like, yeah, we can have a lot of fun, like cooking up sourdough and standing at chalkboards, writing Lagrangians and figuring out the mysteries of quantum gravity. It's going to be a great party. Or they're not. And they're more alien than we can imagine. And that's sort of what the book is exploring. But I don't think that that's a negative outcome. You know, that's really interesting. That's when we learn about ourselves, when we learn like, oh, wow, there are assumptions we've been making

• 38:10Daniel Whiteson?

  this whole time. We didn't even realize we were making. It's sort of like the, you know, the equivalent of traveling to another country and discovering that they don't have coffee for breakfast. And you're like, what? You have spicy fish soup or like this other weird thing for breakfast? They're like, what? That's fascinating, right? How disappointing would it be to go to another country and just discover Starbucks everywhere? Right? And so, yes, you get your Starbucks on when you're in Thailand or whatever, and that's nice, but it's more interesting in some ways to not get that because that's when you learn about yourself and you learn about what's possible out there.

• 38:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  You must be so good at writing grants.

• 38:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Whether I get the answer I want, or I don't get the answer I want, it's interesting either way, and I would fund your grant, Daniel.

• 38:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, thank you. Yes, yes. Well, you know, that is the case in particle physics. We publish no matter what. Find something, publish. Don't find something, publish.

• 39:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, and that's, that's how you have thousands of publications.

• 39:03Speaker 02

  Job security. Yeah.

• 39:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right.

• 39:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly.

• 39:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  So we got a question from a listener, Sarah. So let's go ahead and listen to that question real quick, and I'll see what you two think about the answer.

• 39:13Speaker 06

  I'm Daniel and Kelly. This is Sarah from Lawville, Kentucky. My question is, are opposable funds necessary for the development of tools and technology? Would aliens need to have fingers and thumbs to make spaceships to visit us? Thank you and keep up the good work.

• 39:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So I love that we got a biology question, sort of biology adjacent. I think the, what are the only other organisms that have opposable thumbs? Is it pandas and they use it to hold bamboo?

• 39:38Speaker 02

  Raccoons.

• 39:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Raccoons.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Garbage monsters.

• 39:43Speaker 02

  Absolutely. No, raccoons are the future, dude. I will bet.

• 39:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  I love them.

• 39:49Speaker 02

  They're still spreading, you know?

• 39:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 39:51Daniel Whiteson?

  That's just because raccoons are your neighbors in Berkeley, right?

• 39:53Speaker 02

  Oh, 100%. Yeah, there's alleyways you can't go through because there's signs posted about how they'll beat you up and take your lunch.

• 39:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 40:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  They're made of much sterner stuff in Berkeley than they are out here. They definitely run from us out here.

• 40:06Daniel Whiteson?

  Maybe we should send in the National Guard to clear out the raccoons.

• 40:09Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely. Don't, yeah, don't give anybody any ideas. But, but in all seriousness, I mean, an interesting aspect to this book actually is that biologists have actually spent a lot of time already thinking about aliens. It's this part of the thought experiments that people have already engaged in that we turned to, to write this book. Actually, there's already books about, you know, How humans evolved and how unique our evolutionary path may be compared to other environments, you know, ammonia-based life forms, things like that. And so we actually already had, you know, this sort of rich tradition of thought experiments, of writing to look to for this book. And the answer is, of course, no. Like opposable thumbs,

• 40:52Speaker 02

  they've developed a few times. It's great. They're super useful, but there's a lot of different ways to articulate things in the world and engage in tool use. I mean, dolphins attach a sponge to their nose as they dig around in the inner tidal, or I guess it's for in the sand. But, you know, we have all these examples, even just on Earth, of pretty complicated tool use, developing and being engaged in with animals that don't have these opposable thumbs. Don't get me wrong, they'd be really useful and it'd certainly be fun to meet aliens with opposable thumbs.

• 41:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. And I want to give kudos here to the biologists because they really have done their homework much more than the physicists have.

• 41:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well.

• 41:32Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, imagining like what's beyond the box of our Earth assumptions, you know, what could alien life be like? As Andy says, you know, does it have to be based on carbon? Could it be silicon? That's exactly the kind of thinking I think physics hasn't done enough of, you know, looking back inwards and saying like, well, where are we making assumptions? Where could things have gone differently? And so, yeah, biologists have done a lot of this. But this is a great question. And I think, you know, there are examples of like fairly intelligent critters on Earth, like octopus. They're very smart and they obviously can interact with their environment. They have these grippers, et cetera, but they don't have opposable thumbs. But I think the heart of Sarah's question essentially is like, do you need some way to manipulate the environment so you can like build up on

• 42:13Daniel Whiteson?

  stuff and interact with it in a sophisticated way? And I think that probably is required, but I wonder if that's possible underwater, you know, if it's possible to develop as complex tools underwater, you know, like can you do metallurgy? Can you extract minerals? You know, I think that might be require some sort of land-based thing. But again, you know, that's just our one experience. Who knows? Great question, Sarah.

• 42:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. So are you ruling Enceladus out then as a place where we'll find intelligent life because there's just too much water?

• 42:42Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm looking forward to having my mind blown by being wrong about that when we discover alien technology under the surface of Enceladus.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  Well, okay, I mean, one interesting thing that we, while we're on the subject of hands and thumbs, that we get into with this book, and Daniel kind of was probing at this, is how much of our own, the way we do science and what we're curious about is literally our structure, how our bodies are, the 10 digits on our hand that form how we count things, the fact that we're bipedal, and so our neck cranes up to look at the sky pretty easily. And so we wonder about the stars in a way that maybe an animal on all fours, if it's slithering around, just simply wouldn't. And so a lot of the way that we track the development of science may actually come down to our very human form. And so if an

• 43:32Speaker 02

  alien evolves this entirely different way, they may have just a very different alien preoccupations based on something as simple as them not having thumbs, right?

• 43:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 43:43Speaker 02

  That may be the fundamental difference.

• 43:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  So the genus Homo has been around for a long time, and we've had this like sort of general body shape, but we haven't, as far as I know, been doing science the whole time. So when would we say that we started doing science?

• 43:58Daniel Whiteson?

  Man, that is such a deep question. And I know that the like typical pop-sci explanation is like, well, Galileo and Francis Bacon decided to do experiments about 500 years ago, and then science began. And we've been doing science ever since. And, you know, that's like true, maybe at the very zoomed out level. But when you look at it, like most stories, it's much more nuanced and interesting, because people have been doing experiments for much longer than Galileo and Bacon. You know, even the Greeks, like they tested stuff out. I think this simplified cartoon version.

• 44:31Speaker 02

  Hey there.

• 44:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Ooh, watch it, watch it.

• 44:34Daniel Whiteson?

  I do mean cartoon in a derogatory way there, unfortunately. Wow, I just realized I said that. This oversimplified version, there you go, doesn't tell the true story, because people have been, as Andy said earlier, they've been doing stuff for a long time, but they've also been sometimes wondering, why does it work? And how does it work? And what is the mechanism? They haven't always figured it out. And the technique for figuring that out has definitely Evolved, but also it's evolved since that, you know, moment of the scientific revolution. The way we do science today is not the same as the way we did science 500 years ago. We don't just have experiments anymore. For example, now we have like simulations. Here's a whole like new category of this of scientific investigation that didn't exist before, you know,

• 45:20Daniel Whiteson?

  in vivo, in vitro, in silico, you know, so we don't know like what the future holds also. So science is like a gradually evolving process. The science itself is not a static idea.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  I just love the idea of science not being a static idea. I think that was one of the things that really drew me to the book was Daniel articulating that in the first email he sent to me. And the idea of, you know, a lot of concepts that we have being these kind of living things that are reexamined and evolved and maybe had a few different times that they were quote unquote invented and then fused together. I think Daniel's ability to perceive that is frankly what drew me to the project in the first place.

• 46:00Daniel Whiteson?

  And I think it's fascinating because it lets you imagine how aliens might be doing science. And like, maybe they don't do science at all, as we talked about, but also maybe they do some super crazy advanced version of science. You know, we've added to our technique for building knowledge about the universe. There's no reason to imagine aliens a million or billion years more advanced than us have developed some new technique and they look back at ours and they're like, oh my God, y'all are so primitive. You're still doing that. It takes so long to figure out the universe. They might think about us the way we think about, you know, this hypothetical scenario of aliens who are not interested in all at how things work. Right. And so even just a question of like, do we do science the same way?

• 46:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Tells us so much about our history and, and the assumptions we're making about the way that intelligent critters can understand the universe.

• 46:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep. I love the conversations about that in the book. All right. So let's assume that we get to meet aliens one day, which would be awesome. What would be some challenges of communicating with them? What would, what do you imagine that would be like?

• 46:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I mean, number one is, are we talking to the alien physicists or the alien cartoonists? Right?

• 47:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think we should let Andy answer this one first.

• 47:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, it's from the get go, it's a more difficult prospect than you'd think, right? Cause we have a bunch of examples, even just on earth of. Things that demonstrate a clear intelligence, clear, complex behavior that changes contextually, like all these things, you know, that we're looking for over and over again, where we're like, this makes humans and we have to redefine it every time a biologist like raises their hand and says, well, actually, right, there's like a bunch of other species that do that. But we can't, you know, we find actual communication with these other organisms very difficult, if not impossible, right? Like people, you know, on TikTok, they have those boards where the dog presses the buttons to talk, like, come on, give me a break. And we basically

• 47:49Speaker 02

  made dogs, like, dogs are a human project. You know, that fundamental issue that we deal with here on Earth with all of our species, client or not, is something that would immediately come up with aliens. It's just, you know, where is that point of connection? Where, what is communication? How does it actually happen? And so that's why, you know, we go down this Carl Sagan route of finding the most basic things you could talk to one another about. But, you know, that dream, that Star Trek dream where everybody's got the communicators and stuff like that, like, we don't have those for dolphins. And they're right there.

• 48:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 48:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. And, you know, we don't have a concrete answer to this question, of course, because we haven't met the aliens, which is why we have to do this biological game of like, let's look around on Earth and try to imagine what the most difficult communication scenario is on Earth, and then make it 10 times harder to imagine what it's like for the aliens. And as Andy says, we've already stumbled, right? We can't communicate with whales. We know they're talking to each other, but we don't know what they're saying. But also, we have trouble communicating with humans, right? Like, translating human languages is possible when you have like two existent populations who can like point at stuff and say, this is an apple, that's an apple. But when you have, when one of those populations is gone, but they've left a bunch of written writing behind, we really

• 49:12Daniel Whiteson?

  struggle to figure out what they're talking about, even if we have enormous numbers of examples, even if we have a lot of culture in common, obviously, the same biology, without like crazy cheat sheets like the Rosetta Stone, we may not have even ever translated Egyptian Hieroglyphics and there are still ancient human texts that we don't know what they mean. And so if we don't know how to do it for humans, if it's like too hard for humans, then like, what are the chances we're gonna be able to decode an alien message? And you know, like, we've received weird messages from space. I don't know, messages, but signals from space, like the wow signal, right? What did that mean? We don't know. We don't know how to translate it. Is it encoded? How is it encoded? How would you know if you decoded it correctly, right? We don't know. And that's the whole problem is that there's always an encoding.

• 49:57Daniel Whiteson?

  You can't take an idea and just give it into somebody else's head. You have to pass through some sort of symbols. And those symbols are always fundamentally going to be arbitrary and cultural. They reflect who you are and what you think about those ideas. And as Andy mentioned, Carl Sagan made a great effort on the Pioneer plaque to try to communicate with some potential alien civilization that's gonna pick up the Pioneer probe. And you know, before we rag on him, which we're about to, we should say that NASA only gave him like two weeks to come up with this. They were like, oh, wait, last minute idea. Maybe we should have a message to aliens. Can you have one by Tuesday?

• 50:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 50:33Daniel Whiteson?

  So he did a great job for, you know, the time constraint. But in the end, what he drew on the Pioneer plaque, and you know, it's like a, again, cartoony version of the hydrogen atom.

• 50:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  You mean the best of what we're able to do when you say cartoony version, I'm sure.

• 50:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Absolutely.

• 50:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, okay.

• 50:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, done by good looking people, you know. It's our sort of mental image. And of course, he avoided any English and even avoided like math. He was just trying to come up with pictograms that he thought would inspire in alien minds the same idea. But you know, I showed the Pioneer plaque to a bunch of grad students here at UC Irvine to get a sense for like, does this work? Even on the same like biological construct for physics grad students? And they had no idea what this thing was, you know, they were like, I don't know. They came up with clever interpretations, but nobody got anywhere close to what Carl Sagan was thinking. And it just highlights like how difficult it is to invent a communication system that really is universal. You can't do it.

• 51:32Daniel Whiteson?

  And this whole like linguists and philosophers of language who've worked on this, and they've concluded it's essentially impossible to, to translate a language without those people around to like point at stuff.

• 51:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wet blanket club.

• 51:45Speaker 02

  But you should still buy our book.

• 51:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right.

• 51:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Support the community of wet blanket people.

• 51:53Daniel Whiteson?

  And that's why in the book, we don't focus on this SETI-like scenario where we get a message and we're like writing back and forth to the aliens over thousands of years. Instead, we imagine the aliens are here. We have a physical context together where we can point at apples and try to use that to build up a communication system because that potentially could actually work.

• 52:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, even just you using the word cartoony is actually a good example to talk about like the way that visual language is so contextual, right? Like comics is the art of simplification, like down to the dots of the eyes and like a triangle for no, somebody unfamiliar with comics does not recognize that as a human face necessarily. Or like, you know, the sweat beads going like this, like this is contextual stuff that people familiar with the language are like, oh, I understand that. Somebody unfamiliar needs to be taught it, right? You extrapolate that out to the universe and my God, good luck.

• 52:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think there are these Japanese comics where when they're sleeping, there's like a bubble coming out of their nose. Yeah. And I had no idea what that was. I was like, Ada, why do all, Ada's my daughter is like, why do they all have snot bubbles? And she's like, no, they're sleeping, mom. But I don't get snot bubbles when I'm sleeping.

• 53:03Speaker 02

  Right. Do you have the throb thing? I mean, I don't know, like sweat definitely does erupt from my head whenever I'm nervous, but that's, that's just.

• 53:11Daniel Whiteson?

  I see. That's the equivalent of like a string of Z's coming out of somebody's mouth. Not everybody snores, right? So you might be like, yes, fascinating.

• 53:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  So the wet blankets need to go grab a little bit more tea. And when we're back, we're going to talk about whether or not aliens do math.

• 53:35Kelly Weinersmith?

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• 54:01Speaker 07

  Subject to lender approval.

• 54:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Hey, I'm Nile Rodgers, producer, songwriter, guitarist and co-founder of the group Chic. A great song has a way of defining a moment, a moment of joy, heartbreak, or anything in between.

• 54:20Daniel Whiteson?

  This fall, I'll be driving across the country, dropping in on some of the coolest, most fascinating artists working today. We'll go deep into their lives and careers and hear what it was like before the moment that made them. From hitmakers like Miguel.

• 54:37Speaker 07

  That last year, finishing that record was the hardest experience of my life. Regardless of how everyone else buys into this, I believe in this and I'm gonna push.

• 54:49Daniel Whiteson?

  To rising stars like Alex Warren.

• 54:52Speaker 07

  You know, a song is a story and the verse is setting the scene. And for me, at least, it's allowing me to be personal and vulnerable with the audience, whether it's

• 55:00Daniel Whiteson?

  about my wife and I'm being vulnerable about her, or it's about, you know, my parents, I'm being vulnerable to them. And it's almost like a cinematic piece in a way where each song tells that beautiful story. It's gonna be one hell of a trip. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln Original Series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 55:23Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I spoke with Dr. Laura Jayhai of Cleveland Clinic about how advanced computing

• 55:31Speaker 06

  is helping shorten the path from medical discovery to treatment. The moment that there is a compound that someone in a lab thinks it would be effective to treat a certain disease, it takes about 10 to 13 years from that moment to when that drug is on a shelf for a patient. A big part of that gap could be computationally solved. Better simulation of compounds, designing drug trials that are more efficient, that would finish faster. That was the motivation to bring computational tools and technology closer.

• 56:08Speaker 02

  To biomedical researchers. Learn more about how Cleveland Clinic and IBM are using AI and quantum computing to revolutionize biomedical research at ibm.com/smarttalks.

• 56:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, the wet blankets now have our tea.

• 56:35Daniel Whiteson?

  We've run ourselves out.

• 56:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right, that's right. We're back. And so in the book, you also deal a lot with the question of how do we know aliens will do math? Because often people will be like, well, we'll just communicate in math because it's like this most this basic thing. We must all share it. But as wet blankets, you have to critically examine that. So what do you think?

• 56:55Daniel Whiteson?

  I think that's a really fun idea, and it is a powerful idea. And I actually got to talk to Noam Chomsky when writing this book.

• 57:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  What?

• 57:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, because he famously answers all of his emails, which is incredible. And one reason why I tried to do the same thing. I'm not nearly as famous as Noam Chomsky. I'm sure he gets more emails about aliens than I do. But I wrote to him and asked him what he thought would be a good protocol for beginning a conversation with aliens because like, very smart dude, obviously thought about language. And he actually wrote back and I had a conversation with him. And his basic argument was aliens will do arithmetic. And so we can connect with them on the concept of like, one plus one equals two, which he thought was universal. And we can argue the other side of this in a minute. But it is really fun to think through, like, how do you go from one plus one equals two to like, explain to me how you build a warp

• 57:45Daniel Whiteson?

  drive? There's some really interesting and fundamental concepts there, because over the last 100 years or so, mathematicians have been digging into the basis of math, and they've been wondering, like, where do the rules of math come from? How is it all connected? What are the smallest number of axioms you can begin from and then build up all of human mathematics? What are the foundational rules? And they discovered something really cool, which is that it's all based on arithmetic. Like, if you start from, I know how to add numbers and have a recipe for going from smaller numbers to bigger numbers. Numbers for putting them together, then you can derive like calculus and linear algebra and differential equations, all of the cool, amazing fantastical math we have comes from arithmetic.

• 58:28Daniel Whiteson?

  And I think this is where Noam Chomsky was coming from. He's like, you start there and you can build up to everything else. That is really the foundation of how we think and express ourselves. And of course, all of modern physics requires fancy math, but in the end, it's all just arithmetic.

• 58:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  But has arithmetic always been the same? Like, if you go back to ancient cultures, do they do arithmetic the same way that we do? Is it really that basic?

• 58:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, that's a really cool question because obviously people have been doing arithmetic for thousands of years, right? But it's only like 100 years ago, people formalized what the rules are. Like before that, arithmetic was more like a bunch of examples, like I can write down 30 plus 31 equals 61. How do I do arithmetic for some new set of numbers I've never seen before? You need like a rule that applies always. So yes, people have been adding numbers the same way, but only recently have they like found those fundamental rules that underlie all of it. And it's really cool because those rules are kind of computational. They're like a little recipe, like if you have a number, how do you get to the next one? And you can build up from there. And so the next thing Chomsky said was, yeah, you start from arithmetic

• 59:34Daniel Whiteson?

  and then you go to computer programs. Because if arithmetic is like a little bit of computation, then you can go from there to like the simplest kind of computer. And this is something Alan Turing figured out like almost a century ago, is that there is a basic computer, a way to describe like the most simple way to do computation, to like manipulate information. It's called the Turing machine. And you can go from like, how does arithmetic work? Thinking about that as computation to building up to a Turing machine. And then if you can exchange basically computer programs with the aliens, then you can encode really complex ideas and you can go from there to like,

• 1:00:18Daniel Whiteson?

  here's the the grandeur of quantum field theory, you know, or here's why sleeping people have snot bubbles or whatever. Basically, everything. And so this is the idea is like, try to find the fundamental ideas, start from there and use that to build up to the more complex because incredibly, the world is organized that way, or our ideas are, they're built on these few foundational concepts from which you can extrapolate.

• 1:00:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  So could you help me understand how we get from understanding arithmetic to explaining, for example, the endocrine system? So I can sort of understand how math helps you explain physics and biology absolutely has math. I don't want to imply it doesn't. But how does math help you understand something like the endocrine system? How would you explain that to an alien once you have math as a foundation? Is the idea that the computer program lets you do it after that?

• 1:01:06Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, to answer that, I'd have to understand the endocrine system. No, I actually do understand it.

• 1:01:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's complicated.

• 1:01:12Daniel Whiteson?

  A little bit because of diabetes. But fundamentally, the endocrine system is, you say, there's a mathematical model for it, right? You know, these things create those things and you put insulin in the cell and the sugar goes across the barrier. And though we have a very rich sort of experience with it, fundamentally, it is a mathematical description. We're talking about numbers going up and down and their relationships with each other, the differential equations. One of the reasons the endocrine system is complicated is because it is a bunch of differential equations. And so if you can go from arithmetic to computer programs, you can use those computer programs to describe models, right, to build models of an endocrine system, then you can be like, oh, this is my model of the endocrine system. This connects to this part and this connects to that part.

• 1:01:55Daniel Whiteson?

  And so you can make those links between your mathematical model and what's happening in reality.

• 1:02:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Clearly, you should be one of the delegates on the first group that gets to talk to the aliens.

• 1:02:04Daniel Whiteson?

  I want to be the second group, actually.

• 1:02:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Because the first group might get eaten?

• 1:02:09Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, exactly. We'll send in the biologist and the cartoonist for the first group.

• 1:02:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hey.

• 1:02:17Daniel Whiteson?

  But you know, all of this assumes that aliens do math, the way that we're talking about, that one plus one equals two on alien planets. And nobody's being Terrence Howard here. We're not suggesting that, you know, one times one equals two or something crazy. But that there are human assumptions in, even in arithmetic, you know, the idea of oneness or twoness. And here, we're gonna sound totally like bonkers philosophical for a minute. But these are the questions we're asking, you know, like would aliens come up with this concept of one plus one equals two? It's not that one plus one doesn't equal two around some alien planet, but that they might never arrive at that mathematics because they might not like care about the distinctions between things.

• 1:02:58Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, saying one plus one equals two requires a few basic assumptions, like saying that a thing is a one thing, which means it has an edge, right? You're distinguishing it from the rest of the universe. And where is that edge anyway? Like, where does an apple end and the universe begins? Or where does my body end and the universe begin? These are cultural dotted lines we're drawing around stuff because it makes sense to us. And as Andy says, that's our context. But it doesn't have to be, right? If you like grew up in the atmosphere of a star and everything is sort of fluid and constantly merging into itself, maybe you're never like drawing those dotted lines. Maybe that seems totally made up. And like, yeah, maybe you can invent weird mathematics based on those arbitrary dotted lines, but maybe their mathematics is based on real numbers instead of integers. You know, it's all continuous and fluid.

• 1:03:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so let's say that we do, we meet those aliens and we find a way to communicate with them through math and computer programs. Do you think that they would have made some of the same discoveries as us? Like, would they have gone on the same path that we went on?

• 1:03:57Speaker 02

  One thing that is really fascinating about science as the way humans practice it, at least, is how dependent it is on our own very human fascinations, right? Our preoccupations, like my dad with the sex-changing fish, right? He devoted his life to that. And now we all know that much more about sex-changing fish and it's great. But had he not fallen in love with a blue-headed rass, maybe that wouldn't have happened and we would know that much less. And so, science as humans practice it, you know, it doesn't, you don't get an assignment. Or rarely, I mean, maybe in Soviet Russia. But, you know, you, it's usually based on your preoccupations, your fascinations, and then...

• 1:04:40Speaker 02

  That kind of drives the whole thing forward because somebody else gets fascinated by what you were fascinated by and what you found and what you explained to them and they get preoccupied by it and then they develop it and make it more complex and it compounds and la di da di da, but it all comes down to this very human brain becoming interested in something and what humans become interested in is very human, right? I mean, we evolved to protect ourselves, to pass on our genes and to, you know, exit, right? Like, and so whatever works in service of that is probably what we're preoccupied by, what we're fascinated by in some way, you know, there's arts, there's all these things

• 1:05:22Speaker 02

  that you can get into that aren't, you know, the basic things that help you not get eaten by the lion, but the circumstances that aliens evolved under are by necessity going to be different. I mean, it would be so, it's unlikely enough we're going to meet aliens, having an alien walk out of the alien ship and it looks like Andy would be, you know, it's unimaginable. And so whatever you're dealing with, you're dealing with an organism, something intelligent that has evolved to survive a completely different set of circumstances and so therefore has a completely different set of interests that have just shaped the path of its science. And so from that level, I mean, it's going to be pretty wild and woolly compared to ours.

• 1:06:03Speaker 02

  I mean, maybe there, maybe there's these questions that are fundamental, they can dig down into that preoccupy them, but what gets them there, what gets them to that fundamental question is going to be a different path than the one that took us there. And so it's going to look different to an outsider, i.e. us.

• 1:06:23Daniel Whiteson?

  And even if they are like biologically identical to us, like take the most extreme version of this where there's just humans on planets all over the galaxy, right? Even in that scenario, how similar would their science be to ours? Because if you want to imagine like we're meeting these folks, we're having an interplanetary science conference, we want to see if we're at the same place, are we asking the same questions, do they have answers to our puzzles, right? And even And if they are humans, then they're very likely going to have taken a different path through science. And as Andy suggests, like, if you look back to the history of our science, you can find all these moments when science pivoted on a happenstance, like an accident. And we talked about some of these on the podcast, you know, somebody leaving something in a drawer

• 1:07:08Daniel Whiteson?

  over the weekend and then coming back and developing it anyway, even though that doesn't really make sense, and discovering radioactivity and X-rays and all these things were discovered accidentally. And it could have happened 100 years earlier or 100 years later. And the path of science depends on these things. And so even alternate Earths, we think probably would have a very, very different path through science. Even if you believe that there's one fundamental explanation to the whole universe, that there is an answer out there that is discoverable, we're probably all climbing different sides of sort of physics mountain, which is fun to think about. You know, if you imagine what would it be like to meet all those folks? But we could also do something more concrete, which is to look back into the history of the Earth

• 1:07:52Daniel Whiteson?

  before we had sort of one global scientific community, you know, when we weren't as connected. And so like the Mayans and the Chinese and the Greeks, they all developed sort of initial proto-scientific mathematical approaches to understanding the universe independently. And that's sort of like the best we can do without actually meeting the aliens to try to figure out, like, how universal is it, at least, you know, in the human biological brain, to begin on the same path? Or, you know, is it vastly different? And so in the book, we dig deep into like what the Mayans were up to and how the Chinese mathematical structure was different. It was a lot of fun. I learned a lot about history.

• 1:08:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's one of the things I love about this book is that it's so interdisciplinary. You get a lot of history and a lot of philosophy and a lot of science. And I learned a lot also while reading it.

• 1:08:41Daniel Whiteson?

  That was also a terrifying part of the book because there's a long tradition of physicists writing books outside their discipline and embarrassing themselves. And I did not want to add to that canon. So I sent each of these chapters to like an eminent scholar in that field. Like, did I misrepresent this? I'm reading this this way, is that right? And so I was always on pins and needles when we got those reviews back.

• 1:09:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Your humility will pay you back, I'm sure. That that was a good thing to do.

• 1:09:11Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, you'd rather hear you're wrong about it before you publish the book than after.

• 1:09:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. Yep, that was absolutely my attitude. We also sent our chapters out to experts and like, please, like, be as brutal as possible. I want you to tell me that I'm wrong in secret.

• 1:09:26Speaker 02

  Get the knives out.

• 1:09:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right.

• 1:09:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly.

• 1:09:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  And can you spoil the ending a little bit? Were the Chinese, Babylonian, Mayans approaches to these things super different? Or were they pretty similar?

• 1:09:38Daniel Whiteson?

  They were similar in some ways and different in others. Like, everybody started from, wow, the sky is really interesting and there seem to be patterns. And let's describe those mathematically. But they were also different, like, the Greeks are very geometric. You know, everything, the answer to every question in Greek astronomy is like, where are things in 3D space? Whereas the Chinese were more like algebraic. They had like tables and patterns that they would use. And to them, that was an answer, which is really fascinating. Even though like, the Chinese sort of early model of the universe has sort of geometric inconsistencies. And you can see in the early literature, some Chinese scholars were like, hold on a second. If you're saying this and that, then how do eclipses happen? Hmm, well, maybe let's just not think about that.

• 1:10:23Daniel Whiteson?

  There are different ways of thinking about it.

• 1:10:25Speaker 02

  The tradition of sweeping things under the rug goes a lot further than you think.

• 1:10:31Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, because to them, the answer wasn't geometry, it was algebra. Also, we see like the different cultural importance, like, to the Babylonians, which became the Greek tradition. This is like foundational and became like, really the core of modern intellectual thought. Whereas to the Chinese, like, this was useful and it was important politically. But then they got really interested in things like, you know, material science and gunpowder. And astronomy didn't play as deeply important a role in their culture. So it's really fascinating to see sort of the similarities and the differences.

• 1:11:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, well, I highly recommend the book. It's amazingly well researched, it's super clear, it's funny, the comics are amazing. I highly recommend that people should go out and get Do Aliens Speak Physics? And you two are amazing little colla- little, you two, sorry. You two are amazing collaborators. I'm sorry, I talk to my kids too much.

• 1:11:21Speaker 02

  I'll take it.

• 1:11:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, you two are my favorite two collaborators. I've been working with both of you for years on Fun Topics, so it's a joy for me to talk to both of you.

• 1:11:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yay!

• 1:11:32Speaker 02

  It was an honor to be on the show, and it was an honor to make this book with Daniel, too. This was such a fun time, and it was also so fun to talk to you about it, Kelly. You had such good questions.

• 1:11:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, that's because Daniel weren't being outlined, but it was...

• 1:11:46Speaker 02

  I know how it is.

• 1:11:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, it was great to meet you, Andy. Thanks for being on the show.

• 1:11:52Speaker 02

  100%. Thanks very much, everybody.

• 1:12:01Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 1:12:06Daniel Whiteson?

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

• 1:12:12Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 1:12:19Daniel Whiteson?

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

• 1:12:26Kelly 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.

• 1:12:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

• 1:12:39Speaker 03

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