If we ever make first contact, the hard part might not be sending a message across space, but working out whether aliens do science in anything like our sense, share concepts like number and explanation, and could actually understand what we mean by “physics.”
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Daniel Whiteson is an experimental particle physicist and professor of Physics and Astronomy at University of California, Irvine. His work focuses on the analysis of high-energy particle collisions. He co-hosts a podcast about the Universe (Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe).
Check out his new book with Andy Warner, "Do Aliens Speak Physics?: And Other Questions about Science and the Nature of Reality"!
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1324064641/
2. Book Summary
In Do Aliens Speak Physics? Daniel Whiteson (with Andy Warner) asks what it would take—not just to find intelligent aliens, but to have a meaningful scientific exchange with them. The organizing idea is an “extended Drake equation”: beyond the usual probabilities of life and intelligence, we have to ask what fraction of alien civilizations do something like experiment-driven science (fscience), what fraction of those we could communicate with at all (fcommunication), and then whether we’d even share enough conceptual overlap to ask and answer the “same” scientific questions.
The middle of the book is a tour of the ways those terms might collapse. Even if aliens are curious, their “science” might not look like ours; even if we can exchange signals, translating meanings could be brutally hard; and even math—often treated as the obvious shared language—might not function as a universal bridge if aliens don’t carve the world into countable objects the way we do. The authors use vivid hypotheticals to press the point that what feels “obvious” to us can hide deep assumptions (about counting, representation, and what matters), and those assumptions can reshape what we notice and what questions we even think to ask.
In the later chapters, they argue that—even granting shared questions—there’s no guarantee of the kind of grand, final alien “answer” we fantasize about. Human physics already looks like a patchwork of domain-specific approximations that don’t neatly sew into one overarching quilt, and there can be multiple incompatible “stories” that fit the same observed data, suggesting a Rashomon-style underdetermination that aliens might resolve differently (or not at all). The upbeat conclusion is that this isn’t just a downer about SETI: thinking through alien science is a way of spotting our own hidden commitments and keeping alternative conceptual paths alive—so the exercise teaches us about our science and our minds, even if no perfectly compatible alien colleagues ever show up.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
01:55 - Overview of book
04:29 - Illustrations
05:31 - Extended Drake equation
08:31 - Navigators
11:44 - Different physics
14:28 - Communication
21:25 - First contact
24:50 - Mathematics
29:33 - Vagueness
33:12 - Indispensability
35:57 - Ontology plus dynamics
39:21 - Arbitrary conventions
41:20 - Varieties of life
48:06 - Friendly?
49:16 - Common concepts
52:51 - Learning about ourselves
54:11 - Progress
1:00:03 - Value of philosophy
1:02:39 - Conclusion
