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What's going to happen if we eventually meet space aliens and specifically alien scientists?

If these aliens could see electrons or smell photons, would their science look anything like ours?

Is physics a universal language or just a local dialect of the human brain?

Would alien scientists even use math and equations, or might their truths be organized in a way that we just don't

recognize? Are the laws of nature really laws or simply the stories that our species

tells about its slice of reality? Could alien technology emerge from entirely different questions,

things that we find boring or irrelevant or literally invisible?

What would it mean if science itself is not universal, but just another product of evolution?

Today we'll speak with physicist Daniel Whiteson, who has just written a new book called Do Aliens Speak Physics? So get ready for a

terrific brain stretch. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist

and author at Stanford, and in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe to understand

how we see the world, and sometimes how different creatures might see the world very differently. So let's start here.

When we imagine extraterrestrial life, we usually picture aliens through the only template that we know, which is a mashup of earth creatures, including aliens we've seen in movies and

television. We see animals stretched and tinted into something just foreign enough to qualify as

aliens. They might have big eyes and green skin and maybe tentacles or extra limbs, but quite

possibly when we do find alien life, we're going to find

that it looks much, much different than what we have pictured so far.

Now, I just want to bring that up as a table setting for today's much deeper question,

not about what aliens might look like, it's about how they might think.

Here's why this matters. Every creature on our planet already lives within its own private

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