334 | Daniel Whiteson on the Physics of and by Aliens

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. I'm presuming that a lot of Mindscape listeners are fans of or at least have seen Star Trek and Star Wars and various other TV shows and movie franchises where human beings have to interact with aliens. And there are obvious cinematic constraints which make it much easier to portray the aliens as more or less humanoid than as completely different kinds of organic beings. Even when, you are allowing yourself some fraction of your aliens to be completely different than humans, you you usually have some humanoid looking aliens. We all know that's not supposed to be a prediction. Right? They're making it easy for human actors to play the aliens as characters, as storytelling, as narrative devices, it makes perfect sense even if we all know that the real world probably isn't like that. If there are aliens out there, they will probably look and biologically act completely different than us human beings. We don't have a good idea of what completely different means in this context, but it means something very different. That much we can say. At least we can say that it probably is something very different. There are arguments that maybe there should also be similarities, but the differences can be large. But that's about what the aliens look like and how they biologically are put together. What about how aliens think? After all, we human beings think in very specific ways. We use language as we've talked about here on the podcast. We use math, we use science, we build technological devices, and we tend to think once we developed a successful way of thinking that it's the best way of thinking, the rules of logic or mathematics or the scientific method, the idea of grammar with nouns and verbs and adjectives and adverbs. That just seems natural to us. How else could it be? So what is the space of possibilities when it comes to aliens and how they think? Today's guest is Daniel Weitzen, who is a physicist, a particle physicist, in fact, theorist at UC Irvine. He's an he's the author of several popular books on physics and also host of a podcast with Kelly Wiener Smith, previous Mindscape guest. I, encourage you to check out Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe where they talk about all sorts of individual science questions. Again, just trying to understand the world better. They're not trying to be provocative or anything like that. It's it's very, educational podcast. But Daniel's new book is in collaboration with Andy Warner, who is a cartoonist, and the title is Do Aliens Speak Physics and Other Questions About Science and the Nature of Reality. The idea is let's let our minds roam a little bit. Let's see, can we break out of our presuppositions about how thinking works, how science works? Are there other ways to understand the world? Are there other ways to live and …