Introducing : Inner Cosmos with Host David Eagleman and Guest Daniel Whiteson

17:12David Eagleman:Yeah, this is something that's often cited as a great way to start talking to aliens is to begin with mathematics because mathematics is so basic to our science and some people think it must be fundamental to the universe. and there's lots of good arguments that math is part of the universe. We as human physicists have found many times that math leads us to the truth, like the pure mathematics of it. You know, there's an example of group theory. This is a concept in abstract algebra that math nerds played around with, you know, hundreds of years ago, just because they thought it was cool. They're like, look at these patterns, you can play these games, this is super awesome.

17:51David Eagleman:They didn't care who was relevant. A hundred years after they figured it out, physicists were like, ooh, actually it turns out this perfectly describes the interactions of fundamental particles. It shows us patterns we hadn't imagined, and it just clicked into place beautifully. So the math was there before the physics, right? And it suggests that the math reflects the nature of reality itself, right? That it's not our description of reality, but it's somehow revealing the source code itself. And And of course, that's what we want to be true. We want, as physicists, we're hoping to unravel the nature of reality, not just tell a story about it.

18:29David Eagleman:We want to be describing the territory, not just a random map of the territory. So there are lots of great arguments that math could be fundamental, that math might be part of the universe. But because it's philosophy, of course, there are great arguments on the other side also. And there are strong hints that suggest that maybe math is a human way of thinking and a way to express human ideas compactly, that maybe it's very, very useful for doing physics, but maybe it's not absolutely necessary and aliens could have a different approach.

19:01Daniel Whiteson:And in fact, if they see the world very differently, not picking up on our little tiny window of electromagnetic radiation, maybe not picking up on air compression waves the way that we do, but living in a really different sort of umwelt, this notion of what signals you pick up from the environment. The question is, would they have an extraordinarily different way of picking up on information and expressing it other than math and physics?

19:29David Eagleman:Exactly. And this is something you must know a lot about as a neuroscientist, but our experience of the world doesn't perfectly mirror the actual reality out there, right? We have these narrow little conduits from which we get information about the world, sight, sense, touch, et cetera. And they create in our minds, this sense of what the world is. But we also know, obviously that is incomplete, right? Like we see certain wavelengths of light, but there's light everywhere that's invisible to us. We know that there are particles flowing through us all the time. Neutrinos are everywhere and they're not, and they're not rare.

20:05David Eagleman:There's like billions of neutrinos passing through your fingernails every second. If you could see neutrinos, it'd be all you could see, right? There's dark matter out there. There's all sorts of crazy stuff that we cannot sense or interact with. So our slice of the universe that we perceive is desperately incomplete, which means that our sensorium, the idea we have about where we are in the universe, is something sort of concocted to allow us to survive. And, you know, evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists know much more about that than I do. But what we know is that it's incomplete. And that suggests that aliens, who might evolve in different circumstances and have different needs, could develop a different set of senses.

20:48David Eagleman:And even here on Earth, we see a vast diversity of senses among the animals.

20:53Daniel Whiteson:That's exactly right. Right. And in fact, in 1911, this Baltic physiologist suggested this idea of the Umwelt, which is, as I mentioned, this idea of what are the signals that you're picking up on from around you? So, for example, in the world of the tick, it's just picking up on temperature and butyric acid. That's all it picks up on. For the black ghost knife fish, as it's called, it's just picking up on perturbations in electrical fields. For the blind echolocating bat, it's picking up on air compression waves returning to it. And so the question is, would you develop parallel physics if you had a very different Umwelt?

21:32Daniel Whiteson:And obviously we can point at the creatures on earth, but let's imagine there are dark matter civilizations that are living in dark matter and living right next to us, but we can't see them and they can't see us. That's your question is, would they be asking the same kind of questions or entirely different ones?

21:50David Eagleman:Yeah, it's a great question. You know, sort of an extension of the famous philosophical question like what is it like to be a bat now we're asking what would it like to be like to be an alien physicist and it matters because we can extend our sensations technologically like we develop infrared sensors and we develop sensors that can detect neutrinos etc but in the end we're always translating it back into the language we find intuitive the job of physics of human physics at least is to take the unfamiliar and make it familiar. Think about how we describe photons. Photons are something new and weird and quantum we'll never fully grasp, but we describe them in terms of intuitive concepts that make sense to us.

22:30David Eagleman:We say, oh, it's a particle, it's a wave, it's somehow a weird combination of both. The reality is it's neater, it's something new and bizarre. And we're struggling to understand it because we insist on doing this translation back into something that's intuitive for us. And I think that our sensations, our sensorium, the senses we use to interact with the universe, determine what's intuitive to us. You know, when I think about answering the question like, how is the orbit of Saturn affecting this or that? I'm thinking geometrically. I'm thinking visually. I'm thinking spatially because that's the way my brain works.

23:03David Eagleman:So now imagine an alien, and maybe these aliens are microscopic. And so they have some sort of quantum senses that are natural and intuitive to them. Maybe they can see photons in superposition without collapsing them. And so to them, what's intuitive, what makes sense, the language they want to translate the universe into could be vastly different. And their explanations might make no sense to us, and ours might be very confusing to them. And so I think the question of perception not just determines what you initially see, but ultimately dominates the language you use to express yourself, what it's like to be a human or an alien physicist in the universe.

23:42Daniel Whiteson:So I love that. And what it reminds me of is an idea that I've been writing about lately, which is Umwelt hacking, which is a term I first heard from my friend Eric Weinstein. But the idea of Umwelt hacking is just that we take things that, for example, are very small, and we expand them so that we can see them. Or we take, let's say, light that we cannot see, like ultraviolet and infrared, and we translate it into what we can see. So we're constantly taking everything that we're discovering in the universe and translating it to the little window that we can perceive directly. But what you're suggesting is even the step just beyond that, which is what is intuitive to us?

24:19Daniel Whiteson:Like what can we even understand? So we take photons and translate them into a little story that makes sense to us.

24:27David Eagleman:Or think about like gravitational waves. When they were discovered, they were described as sound waves. Like we know they're not sound waves. There's no compression waves, but they're called chirps and they were translated into literal little sounds that you could play. You press a button in it and hear the gravitational wave. Right. And people talk about it as if the universe is speaking to us now. And like, that's not what gravitational waves are. But of course, it makes sense to translate them into sound waves so that we can sort of digest them. We do this all the time. We take the pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope and then we'll put them on your computer screen in the IR because they would just look black.

25:02David Eagleman:They shift them into the visual. And a lot of people might not be aware that they're seeing, you know, color altered versions of those pictures. So we do this umwelt hacking all the time, but we're always translating it, right? And so imagine we meet aliens and they have a different umwelt. And so, you know, for them, these explanations could be very different. Or it would be incredible to be able to be released from that, to just be able to experience the universe in its natural form and not have to always translate it back into the things that like, you know, these hairy apes find intuitive.

25:35Daniel Whiteson:And you think, and I think that might actually be impossible. And in chapter six of your book, you suggest that maybe instead of revealing a fundamental truth, physics will turn out to be like the film Rashomon. So for any listeners who don't know that film, tell us about the film Rashomon and then tell us why physics might turn out that way.

25:53David Eagleman:Yeah, Rashomon is a great film, a classic one, where, you know, some sequence of events happen. but several people tell a different story about it. And so they don't have to disagree on the facts, but they can disagree about why things happen and what it means. And that's important to remember when we're doing physics, because in physics, what we're doing is filling in the gaps between observations. You know, you have your data, you measure this, you measure that, you measure the other thing. And now you're telling a story about why that happened. For example, you have an electron and you have it between two plates and it accelerates.

26:28David Eagleman:Now you tell a story about why did the electron accelerate? And the typical story is, oh, there's an electric field created by the plates and that pushes on the electron. Cool. But is the field really there or is it just part of the story? Nobody's ever observed a field itself. They've only observed the effects of the fields. The fields are the invisible story we tell to explain the data. And we do this all the time in physics. It's unavoidable. And it might be that aliens come and they have, oh, no, they have a different story. Like it's not fields, it's schmields or something totally different.

27:01David Eagleman:And there's a huge philosophical debate about whether this is possible. Does the universe have to have a single unique explanation for what's going on? Or is it possible to have two different theories of physics, fundamentally conceptually different, that tell different stories about what's happening invisibly behind the curtain, that both work just as well? And what would that mean about the nature of the universe? Like, if you have just started to think about this, your initial reaction is, no, that's bonkers. The universe, there's a reality out there. Things happen for a reason, right? There are laws that must be followed.

27:39David Eagleman:But that's a philosophical assumption. We don't know that's true. And the beauty of this question about aliens is that it might uncover some basic assumptions about the universe we've been making forever we didn't even realize.

27:52Daniel Whiteson:So do you think that there are universal problems that every technological species would have to confront? What's your intuition on that?

28:02David Eagleman:Wow, I don't know if we can make any universal statements about any intelligent species. I mean, they might have such different evolutionary experiences and face different challenges. You might be tempted to say, like, well, everybody's got to get off planet, right? And so everybody's got to develop some sort of, like, technology to get lift. but you know that's a challenge that exists on our planet because we've kind of a massive planet and you can imagine aliens evolving on much smaller moons where it's easier to get off planet for

28:30Daniel Whiteson:example but they'd still think of gravity right they would still have to conceptualize that in

28:35David Eagleman:some way i think probably but you know um and it might be even more important imagine the dark matter aliens you're talking about like we don't know what kind of interactions dark matter might have with itself. Currently, we imagine only has gravitational interactions. You can imagine some sort of dark matter alien that's incredibly vast that only has very weak gravitational interactions with itself. And so it evolves very slowly. Its time scales could be like millennia, millions of years. So I think it's impossible to say that there's anything that aliens have to have in common if you take the broadest possible view of aliens.

29:15David Eagleman:And that's my preference because the aliens I want to meet are not the Star Trek aliens, you know, humans with little fuzz on their forehead or pointy ears or whatever. I want to meet the aliens that blow our minds, that make us think, what? I didn't even imagine that was possible. Or that's not something we ever considered because that's the moment when we learn the most about the nature of life in the universe and intelligent life and the experience of being human. Exactly. And by the way, this is what

29:41Daniel Whiteson:What happens in biology all the time is we find creatures and we think, wait, what? How does that thing exist? And that expands our internal model of what we think is possible. So I agree with you that when people think about space aliens, we typically think about creatures like, you know, the Star Trek, some woman in a tight jumpsuit or something living on a different planet. But of course, they don't have to be from planets at all. They could be really giant things that span galaxies and live in the dark matter part. And they have a totally different set of issues.

30:14David Eagleman:But in order for us to connect with them, right, we have to have something in common. And that's why, you know, the book is structured in this way. Like, it's possible that there's lots of aliens out there that we have nothing in common with. That, you know, we have coffee with them. We're like, yeah, let's just, that was fun, but we're not interested in chatting again. And the aliens I really want to meet are the ones that ask similar questions to us, that are curious about the universe the way that we are. But there's no guarantee, right? It's possible the universe is teeming with aliens, but we're the only curious ones.

30:42David Eagleman:Or that the territory of our curiosity

30:44Daniel Whiteson:is so different that they don't overlap much. For example, let's imagine that we could do animal uplift so that we could talk to squirrels and chat with them about it. It's not totally clear how much we'd have in common with them. Or if we could do that with bacteria, we would really have very different worlds.

31:04David Eagleman:I think even with whales or with chimps, you know, and the challenge of like making those mental connections is underscored by the fact that we haven't. Like we've been on the planet with whales and dolphins and chimps for a long, long time. And we haven't figured out how to cross that brain to brain connection to make that interaction work, which, you know, a lot of people imagine the aliens show up and we're like, dot, dot, dot, the linguists figure it out in 10 minutes. And then we're at the chalkboard. But like, I think that really undersells the challenge of making that brain to brain connection.

32:01Daniel Whiteson:Giving Forth, helping to make July 4th the largest day of giving in American history. It's more than just fireworks. Join this landmark celebration and get your America's Block Party tickets now for$17.76 at america250.org slash LA.

32:17David Eagleman:Introducing the all-new Mazda CX-5, featuring more connection.

32:21Daniel Whiteson:Hey, Google, where's the nearest Pilates class?

32:24David Eagleman:Safety that has your back. More discovery on the scenic routes. more passion in the details, and more control in changing weather.

32:35Daniel Whiteson:The all-new Mazda CX-5. More to move every side of you. See it in five films at mazdausa.com slash five sides. Google is a trademark of Google LLC. Sequences shortened and simulated.

32:47David Eagleman:Ready to finally clean out your closet? With Trashy, you can donate your clothes,

32:53Daniel Whiteson:reduce waste, and earn cash rewards. All in one simple step. Just fill a take-back bag, send it in, and get rewards cash back for every bag. And now, with Trashy Unlimited, you get unlimited bags for just$48 your first year. Clean out, donate, earn rewards. Visit Trashy.io to get started. AI has taken over the internet. Wrong answers, made-up facts. You ask a simple question and get a generated essay nobody asked for. technology trying to decide for you and still getting it wrong the internet didn't used to be this way when you just want to search anything online and find what you need start page is the private search engine that keeps it simple real links less noise and we don't keep track of what you asked try start page at startpage.com that's startpage.com

33:54Daniel Whiteson:By the way, one of the things that I've always been interested in is several podcasts involved in this issue is what if there are alien species that live on a totally different timescale than we do where we are like the tree people to them or vice versa? What are your thoughts on that?

34:10David Eagleman:Yeah, I think that's absolutely possible. there are all these things that we find intuitive and natural right and one of them is a sense of time but the universe operates on incredibly vast time scales like there are things that happened over millions and billions of years that we can we have a hard time processing like think about you know understanding glaciers people thought it was ridiculous to imagine that like ice moves slowly over the surface of the earth and scrapes out valleys because it was such a long time scale process. It was just hard for us to grok or to think about plate tectonics in the same way, but the universe has deep time.

34:48David Eagleman:And if you look at like the formation of our solar system, we tend to think of the solar system as this like steady thing that rolls around the sun in a natural way. But if you look back in the history, like it's quite chaotic. We think maybe there was another planet that got kicked out when Jupiter, you know, entered the inner solar system and then get pulled back out by Saturn. It's crazy chaotic if you think about it on a much faster timescale. And on the other end, there's lots of things that are important in the universe that happen much, much faster timescales than we exist. You know, quantum mechanics is like blindingly fast.

35:21David Eagleman:I do experiments with the Large Hadron Collider. We study particles that exist for like 10 to the negative 23 seconds. So there's this incredible range of time for physical processes. And what we find intuitive are things that like take one second, 10 seconds, maybe 100 years. So absolutely, I think that a lot of our physics is deeply influenced by the timescale of our lives.

35:45Daniel Whiteson:Yeah. Here's a question. When we look back at the ancient Romans and think about them doing math, they were using Roman numerals. And that just makes it really hard. It's sort of parochial and stupid for that. Anyway, when you think about where our own physics is going, let's call it a thousand years from now, when we look back at the laws and particles and forces that we talk about now, will that seem parochial and outdated like Roman numerals?

36:13David Eagleman:Almost certainly. I mean, the progress in science, despite what a lot of people say online, is exponential. We are learning so much about the universe, so much more every 10 years than we knew in the last hundred years. despite some, you know, longstanding open questions. And so I think it's hard to imagine what our science would be like in a thousand years. It's hard to imagine, you know, think about like taking Newton and bringing him to today and talk at him about the university would be, his mind would be blown, right? The kind of things that we're imagining.

36:44Daniel Whiteson:He wouldn't even know how to think about like smartphones. Wait, you melted down beach sand and you have, you know, a hundred billion calculations in a second. And so, yeah. Exactly.

36:54David Eagleman:Yeah. There's so many things that would be hard for him to grok. But, you know, the human brain is capable of that. It's incredible how if you evolve in that time period, you find those things natural and then you build upon them. And so that's the incredible thing about human science is that the next generation begins where we left off, finds it natural and develops a fluency in it and then is able to leapfrog forward. And so it's so difficult to imagine what human science would be like in a thousand years. and not just the things we know, but I think also the process of science itself, because this is something that has changed.

37:30David Eagleman:You know, people think about science, the typical cartoon pop-side story is, you know, the Greeks were thinking about the universe, but not doing experiments until 1500s when Galileo and Francis Bacon came up with the idea of experiments and boom, modern science took off. And now we sort of figured out how to figure things out. But the true story is much more nuanced than that. You know, the Greeks did experiments. They measured the curvature of the earth using shadows and rods, right? That's an experiment. And, you know, the development of the process of science was much more gradual than people like to describe.

38:03David Eagleman:And it's ongoing. We have new ways of doing science now that Galileo never imagined, you know? Like in biology, there's in vivo, in vitro, and now there's in silico, right? We have this computational simulation element to science. So I think that in a thousand years, probably our science will be unrecognizable. And scientists in a thousand years will look back and be like, man, they were so basic and primitive in the way they were asking questions and finding answers. So that makes me think that probably alien science, the very process of science itself, could be very different from what we do.

38:36David Eagleman:You know, I don't think it's even inevitable that they have the same process. They could be down some other path, some other technique for figuring out the nature of the universe. We can't even imagine. So even on that level, we could learn a lot.

38:47Daniel Whiteson:Yeah. And what that means is that for our descendants a thousand years from now, they are essentially aliens to us as we are to them.

38:55David Eagleman:Exactly. We are our own aliens. I love that.

38:58Daniel Whiteson:Yeah. And of course, it turns out that science is changing so rapidly right now just because of AI. I mean, all of us have these massive data sets that we've always put armies of grad students on and plugged through one little thing at a time. Like things are changing so rapidly now in terms of the in silico being able to do things for us, the whole process. It makes me wonder a lot whether there's going to end up being a massive retirement of scientists. Just because a lot of the things that are worth doing a three or five year project on can be done in three or five milliseconds now.

39:35David Eagleman:Yeah, but I think that just expands the kind of science that we can do. Agreed. You know, science in the end is a human thing. It comes from our curiosity. It's questions we are asking. The AI is not curious about the universe. It just does what we're telling it to do. And, you know, I see in biology exactly that kind of transformation. My wife is a biochemist. And, you know, things that took people a PhD to do, then in a few years become a thing on the lab bench. You press a button and it's done. And that doesn't mean biology is over. It means they have expanded it. They can now think about bigger questions they couldn't even imagine before.

40:09David Eagleman:And so AI, similarly, is helping us develop science more rapidly and do things more effectively that we couldn't do before. And I think it's allowing us to ask new questions and find new answers. So I'm not worried about the fate of human scientists. I think that as long as we're curious and we're wondering about the nature of the universe and we value cultural institutions, that's the dangerous part. That we'll still be developing answers and we'll still be in charge of asking the questions.

40:36Daniel Whiteson:Excellent. Now, okay, so let's get back to alien scientists. So one of the things we see in biology a lot is what's called convergent evolution, where, for example, birds and insects both figured out flight, even though with totally different pathways. Do you expect convergences in science with us and some alien civilization where we stumble on the same thing, even if by different pathways?

40:59David Eagleman:Yeah, possibly. And the way we can try to answer that question is to look back into the history of our science and ask, like, are there developments that were inevitable or not? And surprisingly, what you find when you look back in the history of science is so much of it, so many of the crucial pieces, the moments when we gained understanding were due to chance, were due to accidents. You know, like the discovery of radiation and atomic decay was because a guy put some uranium on a photography plate and the rain spoiled his planned experiments. So he just like left it over the weekend. And when he came back on Monday, he developed it and discovered radiation accidentally, right?

41:41David Eagleman:Because it was raining in Paris. And the frustrating thing about that is that it could have happened 100 years earlier. All the technology was there. Just nobody had that lucky accident. So we could be 100 years deeper into our understanding of quantum mechanics. Imagine if quantum mechanics had been developed 100 years earlier. so that like when Einstein is a kid, he's now immersed in quantum mechanics. When he's developing his theory of relativity, he already has a quantum brain. Does he still come up with a classical theory of relativity, which is, you know, strongly in confrontation with quantum mechanics?

42:17David Eagleman:Or does he just come up with quantum gravity in one fell swoop, you know? So it suggests that there's lots of paths through science, that there's lots of happy accidents that determine the way that science happens. You know, unfortunately on Earth, we no longer have parallel cultures developing science the way we did, you know, a few thousand years ago before we had globe-spanning civilizations. But at one point, the Mayans, the Chinese, the Greeks were all sort of independently investigating how the universe works. And it would be so fascinating if today we could see where those cultures ended up if they hadn't been intermingled.

42:53David Eagleman:We would know something about the inevitability of math and astronomy and science and physics. What an amazing experiment that would have been.

43:01Daniel Whiteson:Oh, is there enough data historically to ask these questions about which things did they converge on and which went off on different paths?

43:08David Eagleman:There is. We dig into it in the book a little bit and we see that lots of these cultures started with, okay, there are patterns in the sky. Let's try to explain those patterns. They seem to be important. Let's use math to explain those patterns. But there is divergence there. Like the Greeks, very geometrical to them. Answers were like, where are things? Build me a map in my mind. The Chinese were more arithmetic or algebraic. They like wanted patterns in equations on the table, you know, things they could write down. They weren't building so much a geometric image. And you can see actually in the ancient literature, some Chinese scholars like trying to take a geometric approach and finding it wasn't really working.

43:49David Eagleman:and then just like retreating, being like, let's go back to our equations. And so there are divergences there. Of course, later we understood there's a fundamental connection between geometry and algebra, of course. But there definitely were a lot of similarities in the initial path. But we don't know. There isn't enough data to know, like, would they have ended up in the same place or not?

44:10Daniel Whiteson:What do you think? What's your intuition about physics? Does it have to look like equations? or if you were a dark matter creature, would physics be expressed some other way?

44:20David Eagleman:Yeah, this is a really fun question. It goes back to the earlier conversation we were having about the necessity of math. And I remember feeling when I was learning about quantum mechanics, like, wow, this is the source code of the universe, man. This is not just a description. This is how the universe decides whether an electron goes left or right when I'm reading about how precise those equations are and the experiments that validate them. But then I read a book by Hartree Field and it's called Science Without Numbers. And in this book, he tries to demonstrate that you don't need number lines.

44:54David Eagleman:All you need are like comparisons, like things that are bigger and small. You need relationships. But he argues that this idea of numbers, this number line that we've created, it's useful. It's a nice way to hang things, but you don't actually need it to do science. And he goes through this incredible exercise of developing alternative theory of gravity with no numbers, right? Right. So science without numbers. Right. And he argues that this concept of a gravitational field or any field is an intermediate calculation that we find useful, but doesn't have to reflect reality. And so his version of gravity has none of these numbers in it.

45:31David Eagleman:And so it's not expressed that way you were saying, like, with the same kinds of equations. And so that's fascinating. And it's it's ugly. Like, it's not pretty. It's not a nice way. Nobody's going to use it to do science. But it makes the point that our math, while it's very handy, it's very effective, it's very useful, might not be necessary. Parts of it could just be convenience. So it's fascinating to think about how aliens might do science. And, you know, even our way of expressing science in equations and symbols is fairly new. You know, when Newton is writing Principia, he's not writing equations.

46:07David Eagleman:He's expressing things linguistically. You know, he writes the force is related to, he's using English, not the same sort of symbol. So, you know, the way that we do science, we imagine it's fundamental, it's universal, but it's really a snapshot of our current culture and kind of a narrow window of time.

46:40Daniel Whiteson:concert happening at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Experience music performances by major artists, patriotic tributes, and the kickoff to Giving 4th, helping to make July 4th the largest day of giving in American history. It's more than just fireworks. Join this landmark celebration and get your America's Block Party tickets now for$17.76 at America250.org slash LA.

47:04David Eagleman:Introducing the all-new Mazda CX-5, featuring more connection.

47:08Daniel Whiteson:Hey Google, where's the nearest Pilates class?

47:11David Eagleman:Safety that has your back. More discovery on the scenic routes. More passion in the details. And more control in changing weather. The all-new Mazda CX-5.

47:24Daniel Whiteson:More to move every side of you. See it in five films at mazdousa.com slash five sides. Google is a trademark of Google LLC. Sequences shortened and simulated. Ready to finally clean out your closet? it? With Trashy, you can donate your clothes, reduce waste, and earn cash rewards all in one simple step. Just fill a take-back bag, send it in, and get rewards cash back for every bag.

47:49David Eagleman:And now, with Trashy Unlimited, you get unlimited bags for just$48 your first year. Clean out, donate, earn rewards. Visit Trashy.io to get started.

48:03Daniel Whiteson:Ever look something up online and then see ads for it everywhere? That's not a coincidence. Startpage is the private search engine that finds what you need without anyone finding out you asked. Try Startpage.com. That's Startpage.com.

48:25Daniel Whiteson:So how would we recognize alien science if we saw it? And what we're doing now, of course, is pointing radio telescopes all over and trying to guess what they might be communicating if there were someone out there.

48:38David Eagleman:Yeah, that's a great question. And let me preface by saying I love the SETI project and I want us to be listening for messages from space. And I think we should support it more. I do think philosophically it might be hopeless. I think that if aliens send us a message, we have almost no chance of recognizing that it's a message. And even in the fantastically lucky scenario when we do that, of decoding it. Because any message we get is going to be translated from their ideas into some kind of code. Some kind of symbols, a pattern, sequences, something. Even like an engraving on a pioneer plaque that they send us, right?

49:16David Eagleman:There's an arbitrary step there where you translate ideas into symbols. It happens in every single language. It's the only way to communicate via brains, right? Through this symbolic step. And those symbols, as much as you try to make them universal, will always reflect your culture. So we get an alien message. We could try to decode it, but we have no idea what their symbols mean or what it reflects about their culture or what things they find natural. And the worst part is, how do we know if we got it right? The Rosetta Stone is a great example because at least we have a cheat sheet. We know what we're supposed to be translating into, though it still took us 20 years to crack hieroglyphics with that cheat sheet.

49:55David Eagleman:Now, aliens, like we have no cultural in common. We have no clues. We have no context. We have no idea what we're translating it into. I think it's a fantasy to imagine that we could ever translate an alien message. And, you know, we have funny messages from space, like the wow signal, right? This bizarre, never repeated signal from space. Very brief. What does it mean? We have no idea. Is it anything? Is it just some weird blip? There are some now theories about how it could maybe be possible astrophysically.

50:26Daniel Whiteson:Tell the listeners more about the WOW signal, what it is.

50:28David Eagleman:Yeah, the WOW signal is a signal that came, I think it was in 1977 in a radio array. And, you know, they just were listening to the sky. And all of a sudden, the signal came through, which is basically exactly what you would expect, you know, a signal from a civilization. It looked like it has like a nice smooth shape. It rises and then it falls. and it's called the wow signal because the guy who was monitoring it, this is back in the day when you didn't have like fancy screens, it's like the thing it prints out on a printer. That's the way this telescope operates. He saw this thing and he wrote on it, wow, oh my gosh, because that was his like literal reaction to seeing the signal.

51:06David Eagleman:And that enthusiasm remains, but that's basically all we have. We have no idea what it was, who it was from, if it was from anybody, what it might mean. Is it an intergalactic ping? You know, is it an attempt to probe our firewall and then send us a virus? Is it, you know, who knows, right? Or is it just some weird burp from a quasar somewhere? And so that's the challenge of decoding these things is that we have none of the cultural clues. And so in the book, that's why I argue that the only way this could ever work is if the aliens arrive. Because if they're here, then we can do stuff like we can point to an apple and say apple.

51:41David Eagleman:And we can point to two apples and say two apples. And we can start, because we have a physical context in common when they're here, we can use that as a way to attach meaning to symbols and then build on those symbols.

51:53Daniel Whiteson:So let me ask you this. Let's imagine some aliens arrived, and that means that they've got technology that's better than we do because they've crossed the galaxy they've gotten here. What is the first question you would ask them after we figured out the language part? What would you ask them about their technology or their worldview? you.

52:10David Eagleman:Well, first of all, I don't want to be on that visiting party because I'm a wimp and I don't want to risk being eaten for lunch. But, you know, if the linguists have figured it out and made some contact and we're sitting down with the aliens, then yeah, I have questions. You know, I want to know how did the universe begin? What were its first moments? I want to know what is the universe made out of? These are the questions that drive my personal scientific career that I desperately really want to know the answer to because I feel like they're so meaningful philosophically. Like if you knew the way the universe began and if a factual account, then that would tell you a lot about the context of our lives and its meaning and maybe how we should live it.

52:50David Eagleman:Or if you knew what the fundamental description of the nature of matter and space and energy were, that would tell you something about what this is, this crazy, bizarre, beautiful, bonkers experience that we're all sharing what it really means. So I want those answers. And if aliens are out there and they have those answers and they're listening right now, please come talk to us, tell us those answers because we'll figure it out eventually, but it might take us a thousand years, a million years, and boy, I'm not going to be alive that long. So I just kind of want to cheat sheet. So those are the questions I would ask the aliens if they show up.

53:25David Eagleman:Oh, great.

53:25Daniel Whiteson:I certainly hope some aliens are listening to Inner Cosmos. So here's a question. If aliens explained quantum mechanics to you in a way that suddenly made it feel trivial, they just had a totally different framework, would you feel relieved or would you feel disappointed that we just wasted a century on it?

53:44David Eagleman:Absolutely relieved. Absolutely. I mean, that's the best case scenario, right? To have the aliens explained to us and for it to make sense. Because my nightmare scenario was the opposite. Aliens come, they understand quantum mechanics, they try to explain it to us, and we're just like, huh? I don't get it. You know, neurologically, how do we know that we're even capable of representing these ideas in our minds? It boggles my mind that, you know, these brains which developed to be able to like stay warm and dry and fed a million years ago can think about like 11-dimensional space and, you know, crazy transformations.

54:20David Eagleman:Why are we capable of all of this? I don't understand it.

54:23Daniel Whiteson:It's only because of the Umwelt hacking in the sense that we're figuring out ways to squeeze that concept into a concept we can understand. But that probably does have its limitations.

54:34David Eagleman:It must have limitations, right? It's certainly not true that we can understand anything in the universe. I mean, my dog is smart, but definitely doesn't understand quantum mechanics as well as I do. And there must be some limitations. But, you know, we have these developments now, as you say earlier, we can extend our understanding using AI. And, you know, in my field in particle physics, we're doing this all the time. There's lots of things that require AI in order for them to work. We're not yet at the point where we require AI to understand things. But, you know, one scenario is the aliens come, they try to explain it to us.

55:07David Eagleman:We're like, huh? But the AI is like, I got this. And, you know, what if the AI can figure it out, but they can't explain it to us? And then the aliens just like talk to the AI and leave us out of the party. To me, that's the most frustrating potential scenario. that the answers are out there, the aliens want to share them, and we just can't get it. We just cannot do the Umfeld hacking enough to translate it into intuitive concepts in our mind, get that satisfaction that I'm personally looking for.

55:35Daniel Whiteson:Right. The best the AI can do is tell us that the answer is 42, but it can't explain it better than that. Exactly.

55:42David Eagleman:Exactly. Douglas Adams was ahead of his time, as always.

55:45Daniel Whiteson:Okay, a few rapid-fire questions. What is the most ridiculous but possible alien invention that you would love to see?

55:57David Eagleman:Self-driving toothbrushes, you know? Why do we have to hold these things? They should just drive themselves around our mouths.

56:04Daniel Whiteson:Excellent. If you had to guess, what is one thing that humans might teach aliens that would blow their minds?

56:12David Eagleman:Oh, wow. I would love if some cute little bit of human mathematics that we developed just for fun turned out to solve one of their physics problems. Like maybe they've been missing it and this is just like the chocolate that their peanut butter needed, you know. That would be fantastic because, as you say, if the aliens show up, they're probably more advanced than we would be. So it would be wonderful if we could contribute one little thing. I think maybe that's the most likely.

56:35Daniel Whiteson:Oh, that's good. Yeah, we hand them a Penrose tile and they're like, my God, that's it. Yeah, okay, good. Good. If you were invited to sit in in an alien classroom physics lecture, what would you expect to see around you? Probably not whiteboards. Would they smell their equations? Would they feel dark matter?

57:00David Eagleman:I would be most interested in what those kids are asking. You know, maybe even more than the answers, because what aliens find intuitive and what their kids find weird, I think would tell us a lot about how they sense the universe and whether our questions are meaningful, whether our questions are just part of our humanity or whether our questions reflect something deep about the universe.

57:28Daniel Whiteson:That was my interview with physicist Daniel Whiteson, and I hope you felt your mind get stretched way beyond the boundaries of Earth. Thinking about alien science, of course, goes beyond aliens. It's a way of holding a mirror to our own assumptions and asking whether the universe is stranger than we yet perceive, or even stranger than we can perceive. So I find myself looping back to one central idea. When we ask whether aliens would build the same kind of science, we're also asking how human is our science? Are our particles and forces, our laws and equations, discoveries of something universal or inventions that reflect the peculiarities of our senses and the accidents of our history?

58:19Daniel Whiteson:I'm given a little bit of hope by thinking about convergent evolution here on Earth, wings evolved in insects and birds and bats because flight was simply too useful a trick not to stumble on again and again. But the details are different in every lineage. You've got feathers here, you've got membranes there. Maybe science works in the same way, maybe any technological species will discover certain convergences like gravity or energy or chemistry because those are necessary to survive and thrive. But the way they conceptualize those discoveries may be as different as wings are between a moth and a falcon.

59:06Daniel Whiteson:And the other really important idea here is that of the umwelt. Just as my dog inhabits a fragrant cacophony of odors that I can't access, alien intelligences might navigate dimensions of reality that are invisible to us. Their science could be sculpted by those senses and by questions that would never even occur to us. Where we wrestle with quantum mechanics, maybe they stroll through that in first grade, and then they had very different questions in the second grade. Where we ask, why does time only move forward? Perhaps their perception of time makes our question seem quaint or meaningless.

59:49Daniel Whiteson:One of the things I loved about the conversation today was the notion of counterfactuals or what ifs. Many of you know that exploring what ifs is the thing I love to do most. And if you've read my book of fiction, Sum, S-U-M, you'll know that I wrote 40 mutually exclusive versions about what we're doing here. And each was meant to stretch the imagination in a different direction. None of the stories in my book are meant to be true. The point is to expand the fence lines of what we can think about. So I'm going to read a very short story today from that book that pairs so nicely with today's conversation.

1:00:32Daniel Whiteson:This story is called Giantess. The afterlife is all about softness. You find yourself in a great padded compound. Everything appears designed for quietness and comfort. Your feet fall silently on a cushioned floor. The walls are pillowed. Echoes are dampened by foam ceiling tiles. A hard surface is impossible to find. Feathers pad everything. When you enter the Grand Hall, the first thing you notice is a sizable and princely man. He looks just as you might expect a god to appear, except that he is noticeably skittish and strained with worry around the eyes. He will probably be explaining that he's greatly disturbed by the nuclear arms proliferation on Earth.

1:01:23Daniel Whiteson:He says that he often awakens in a cold sweat with the sounds of colossal blasts hammering in his ears. To be clear, he says to you, I am not your god. Instead, you and I are galactic neighbors. I am from a planet associated with the star you call Terzan IV. We are all in the same mess. What mess, you ask? Please don't talk so loudly, he softly admonishes. For a long time, we have been studying our neighbors, you Earthlings and 37 other planets besides. We have developed highly accurate systems of equations to predict the future growth and social directions of your planets. Here, he fixes your eyes.

1:02:08Daniel Whiteson:It turns out that you Earthlings are among the least tranquil and content. Our predictions indicate that your weapons of war will grow increasingly loud. Your space exploration programs will produce thousands of noisy vessels that will thunder throughout the heavens with their deafening rocket propulsion. You Earthlings are like your explorer, Cortez, standing atop a mountain peak and preparing to perturb every beach at all the lapping fringes of the Pacific. We're in a mess of expansionism, you manage. That's not the mess, he hisses. allow me to illustrate the larger picture. You and I, our planets, our galaxy, we're part of what you should think of as an immeasurable living mass.

1:03:00Daniel Whiteson:You might call it a giantess, but summarizing the concept in a word might give you the illusion that you can have a hint of a notion of her enormity. To give you a sense of scale, you are the size of an atom for her. Your earth, sprouting with its untold layers of furiously fecund species, your earth is tantamount to a single protein in the shadowy depths of a single one of her cells. Our Milky Way constitutes a single cell, but a small one. She consists of hundreds of billions of such cells. For millions of years, my people had no notion of her, just as a flatworm is unlikely to discover that the planet is round.

1:03:48Daniel Whiteson:A colony of bacteria will never know the walls of the flask. A single cell in your hand will not know it is contributing to a concerto on the piano. But with advancing philosophy and technology, we came to appreciate our situation. Then, a few millennia ago, it was theorized that we might be able to communicate with her. It was proposed we might decipher her structure, deploy signals, influence her behavior in a manner that infinitesimal molecules, hormones, alcohol, narcotics, influence a creature like you. So we organized and educated ourselves. Instead of fretting through the doomed, ignoble cycles of local politics, we dedicated our economy and sciences toward understanding the biochemistry of universal scales.

1:04:44Daniel Whiteson:We methodically mapped out the signaling cascades and stellar anatomy of her nervous system, and at last discovered how to transmit a signal to her consciousness. We sent a sharply defined sequence of electromagnetic pulses, which interacted with local magnetospheres, which influenced asteroid orbits, which nudged planets closer and farther from stars, which dictated the fate of life forms, which changed the gases in the atmospheres, which bent the path of light signals, all in complex interacting cascades we had worked out. Our calculations told us that it took a few hundred years for the transmission to arrive at her consciousness.

1:05:32Daniel Whiteson:At the time of the arrival, I was sad to be traveling away from the planet while everyone was so excited to see what would happen. His face twitches with painful trickles of reminiscence. But no one would have guessed what happened next. A great sheet of meteors rained down. Incendiary hydrogen clouds crushed in, and those were followed by a multitude of black holes that mercilessly swallowed up the flying chunks and dust and the last light of remembrance. No one survived. In all probability, this was neutral to her. It might have been an immune system response, or she might have been scratching an itch, or sneezing, or getting a biopsy.

1:06:20Daniel Whiteson:So we discovered that we can communicate with her, but we cannot communicate meaningfully. We are of insufficient size. What can we say to her? What question could we ask? How could she communicate an answer back to us? Perhaps that was her attempt to answer. What could you ask her to do that would have relevance to your life? And if she told you what was of importance to her, Could you understand her answer? Do you think it would have any meaning at all if you displayed one of your Shakespearean plays to a bacterium? Of course not. Meaning varies with spatial scale. So we have concluded that communicating with her is not impossible, but it is pointless.

1:07:12Daniel Whiteson:And that is why we are now hunkered down silently on the surface of this noiseless planet, whispering through a slow orbit, trying not to draw attention to ourselves. Again, the point of my book, Sum, was to expand the territory of our thinking. And Daniel's interest in alien science serves the same purpose. It challenges us to wonder what else is possible. And in doing so, it makes us more aware of the narrowness of our own windows onto reality. So what we see is that speculating about aliens reveals something about ourselves. We live inside these internal models of the world constructed by our brains, and those models are necessarily limited.

1:08:01Daniel Whiteson:By imagining alien sciences, we stretch those models and remind ourselves that what we take to be universal might be something much smaller, a reflection of our own history, of our own sensory mechanisms. of our own imagination. So Daniel's journey is an excellent way to loosen the grip of our assumptions, to stand outside our own thought patterns, and to ask, how else might reality be described? So as we finish this episode, I'll leave you with this. The next time you look into the night sky and wonder who else might be out there, try shifting the question. Don't just imagine what aliens look like or what gadgets they've invented, ask yourself instead, what questions are they asking?

1:08:51Daniel Whiteson:What mysteries are obvious to them but invisible to us? And vice versa. And what might our science look like if we had evolved their senses, their histories, their ways of being in the world? Because in the end, thinking about aliens is one of the most powerful ways to understand ourselves.

1:09:18Daniel Whiteson:Go to eagleman.com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading. Join the weekly discussions on my sub stack and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave comments. Until next time, I'm David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos.

1:09:45David Eagleman:Introducing the all-new Mazda CX-5, featuring more connection. Hey Google, where's the nearest Pilates class? Safety that has your back. More discovery on the scenic routes. More passion in the details. And more control in changing weather.

1:10:03Daniel Whiteson:The all-new Mazda CX-5. More to move every side of you. See it in five films at mazdausa.com slash five sides. Google is a trademark of Google LLC. sequences shortened and simulated. This July 4th, come celebrate at America's Block Party, hosted by America 250. America's Block Party is a can't-miss 4th of July concert happening at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Experience music performances by major artists, patriotic tributes, and the kickoff to Giving 4th, helping to make July 4th the largest day of giving in American history. It's more than just fireworks. Join this landmark celebration and get your America's Block Party tickets now for$17.76 at america250.org slash LA.

1:10:46Daniel Whiteson:Ready to finally clean out your closet? With Trashy, you can donate your clothes, reduce waste, and earn cash rewards. All in one simple step. Just fill a take-back bag, send it in, and get rewards cash back for every bag. And now, with Trashy Unlimited, you get unlimited bags for just$48 your first year.

1:11:08David Eagleman:Clean out, donate, earn rewards. Visit Trashy.io to get started.

1:11:15Daniel Whiteson:AI is taking over the internet. Made up facts, technology thinking for you. Startpage is the private search engine that still finds what you need without the noise. Try Startpage at Startpage.com. That's Startpage.com.

1:11:30David Eagleman:This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.