334 | Daniel Whiteson on the Physics of and by Aliens

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll

Physics, Science

4.7 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 3 November 2025

⏱️ 74 minutes

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Summary

The universe as revealed by physics is objective: it's out there, existing and behaving in ways that are completely independent of human thought. But the process by which we learn about the universe, and the language with which we talk about it, is extremely human-dependent. Does that mean that aliens would do science differently, and even think differently about physics, even if we all live in the same universe? Physicist Daniel Whiteson has teamed with cartoonist Andy Warner to investigate these questions in their new book Do Aliens Speak Physics?

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/11/03/334-daniel-whiteson-on-the-physics-of-and-by-aliens/

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Daniel Whiteson received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California at Berkeley. He is currently a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and recipient of an Emmy nomination. He is the author of several books, often with co-author Jorge Cham. He is the co-host (with Kelly Weinersmith) of the podcast Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. I'm presuming that a lot of
0:06.0	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.
0:20.2	And there are obvious cinematic constraints
0:23.4	which make it much easier to portray the aliens as more or less humanoid than as completely
0:31.2	different kinds of organic beings. Even when you are allowing yourself some fraction of your aliens to be completely different
0:39.9	than humans, you usually have some humanoid-looking aliens. We all know that's not supposed
0:45.9	to be a prediction, right? They're making it easy for human actors to play the aliens as characters,
0:53.3	as storytelling, as narrative devices. It makes perfect sense,
0:57.0	even if we all know that the real world probably isn't like that. If there are aliens out there,
1:02.9	they will probably look and biologically act completely different than us human beings.
1:08.2	We don't have a good idea of what completely different means in this context,
1:12.6	but it means something very different, that much we can say. At least we can say that it probably
1:18.4	is something very different. There are arguments that maybe there should also be similarities,
1:22.0	but the differences can be large. But that's about what the aliens look like and how they biologically are put together.
1:31.1	What about how aliens think? After all, we human beings think in very specific ways. We use language,
1:38.7	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.
2:03.3	How else could it be? So what is this space of possibilities when it comes to aliens and how they think?
2:11.1	Today's guest is Daniel Whiteson, who is a physicist, a particle physicist, in fact, theorist at UC Irvine. He's the author of several
2:20.8	popular books on physics and also host of a podcast with Kelly Wienersmith, previous Minescape
2:26.8	guest. I encourage you to check out Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe, where they talk
2:32.2	about all sorts of individual science questions.
2:35.1	Again, just trying to understand the world better.
	...

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