“Imagine the day the aliens arrive.” So begins Do Aliens Speak Physics? by the US particle physicist Daniel Whiteson and the cartoonist and author Andy Warner. From that starting point, if you believe the plots of many works of science fiction, it wouldn’t be long before we’re communicating with emissaries of an extraterrestrial civilization. Quickly, we’d be marvelling at their advanced science and technology.
But is this a reasonable assumption? Would we really be able to communicate with aliens? Even if we could, would their way of doing science have any meaning to us? What if an advanced alien civilization had no science at all? These are some of the questions tackled by Whiteson and Warner in their entertaining and thought-provoking book.
While Do Aliens Speak Physics? focuses on the possible differences between human and alien science, it made me think about what science means to humans – and the role of science in our civilization. Indeed, when I spoke to Whiteson for the Physics World Weekly podcast (to be published 23 October), he told me that his original plan for the book was to examine if physics is universal or shaped by human perspective.
But when he pitched the idea to his teenage son, Whiteson realized that approach was a bit boring and decided to spice things up using an alien landing. At the heart of the book is a new equation for estimating the number of alien civilizations that scientists could potentially communicate with – ideally, when the aliens arrive on Earth.
The authors aren’t the first people to do such a calculation. In 1961 the US astrophysicist Frank Drake famously did so by estimating how many habitable planets might exist and whether they could harbour life that’s evolved so far that it could communicate with us. Whiteson and Warner’s “extended Drake equation” adds four extra terms related to alien science.
The first is the probability that a civilization has developed science. The second is the likelihood that we would be able to communicate with the civilization, with the third being the probability that an alien civilization would ask scientific questions that are meaningful to us. The final term is whether human science would benefit from the answers to those questions.
One of Whiteson and Warner’s more interesting ideas is that aliens could perceive science and technology in very different ways to us. After all, an alien civilization could be completely focused on developing technology and not be at all interested in the underlying science. Technology without science might seem deeply foreign to us today, but for most of history humans have focused on how things work – not why.
Blacksmiths of the past, for example, developed impressive swords and other metal implements without any understanding of how the materials they worked with behaved at a microscopic level. So perhaps our alien visitors will come from a planet of blacksmiths rather than materials scientists.
Mind you, communicating with alien scientists could be a massive challenge given that we do so mainly using sound and visual symbols, whereas an alien might use smells or subatomic particles to get their point across. As the authors point out, it’s difficult even translating the Danish/Norwegian word hygge into English, despite the concept’s apparent popularity in the English-speaking world. Imagine how much harder things would be if we used a different form of communication altogether.
But could physics function as a kind of Rosetta Stone, offering a universal way of translating one language into another? We could then get the aliens to explain various physical processes – such as how a mass falls under the influence of gravity – and compare their reasoning to our understanding of the same phenomena.
Of course, an alien scientist’s questions might depend on how they perceive the universe. In a chapter titled “Can aliens taste electrons?”, the authors explore what might happen if aliens were so small that they experience quantum effects such as entanglement in their daily lives. What if an organism were so big that it feels the gravitational tug of dark matter? Or what if an intelligent alien could exist in an ultracold environment where everything moves so slowly that their perception of physics is completely different to ours?
The final term in the authors’ extended Drake equation looks at whether the answers to the questions of alien physics would be meaningful to humans. We naturally assume there are deep truths about nature that can be explored using experimental and mathematical tools. But what if there are no deep truths out there – and what if our alien friends are already aware of that fact?
When Drake proposed his equation, humans did not know of any planets beyond the solar system. Today, however, we have discovered nearly 6000 such exoplanets, and it is possible that there are billions of habitable, Earth-like exoplanets in the Milky Way. So it does not seem at all fanciful that we could soon be communicating with an alien civilization.
But when I asked Whiteson if he’s worried that visiting aliens could be hostile towards humans, he said he hoped for a “peaceful” visit. In fact, Whiteson is unable to think of a good reason why an advanced civilization would be hostile to Earth – pointing out that there is probably nothing of material value here for them. Fingers crossed, any visit will be driven by curiosity, peace and goodwill.
- 2025 WW Norton & Company 272pp £23.00 hb; £21.84 ebook
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