Ars Technica: The Voyager Golden Record is maybe one of the best identified instance of people trying to speak with an alien species, spearheaded by the late Carl Sagan, amongst others. However what are the chances that, regardless of our greatest efforts, any aliens will ever be capable of decipher our “message in a bottle”?
Daniel Whiteson: I did a casual experiment the place I printed out an image of the Pioneer plaque and confirmed it to a bunch of grad college students who had been younger sufficient to not have seen it earlier than. That is Sagan's viewers: organic people, similar mind, similar tradition, physics grad college students—none of them had any thought what any of that was speculated to seek advice from. NASA gave him two weeks to provide you with that design. I don't know that I'd've achieved any higher. It's straightforward to criticize.
These people, they had been doing their greatest. They had been attempting to step away from our tradition. They didn't use English, they didn't even use mathematical symbols. They understood that these issues are arbitrary, they usually had been reaching for one thing they hoped was going to be common. However in the long run, nothing might be common as a result of language is at all times symbols, and the selection of these symbols is bigoted and cultural. It's inconceivable to decide on an emblem that may solely be interpreted in a method.
Basically, the e-book is attempting to poke at our assumptions. It's so inspiring to me that the historical past of physics is suffering from instances when we now have needed to abandon an assumption that we clung to desperately, till we had been proven in any other case with sufficient information. So we've received to be actually open-minded about whether or not these assumptions maintain true, whether or not it's required to do science, to be technological, or whether or not there may be even a single clarification for actuality. We may very well be very nicely stunned by what we uncover.
Ars Technica: It's usually assumed that math and physics are the closest factor we now have to a common language. You problem that assumption, probing such questions as “what does it even imply to ‘rely'”?
Daniel Whiteson: At an preliminary look, you're like, nicely, in fact arithmetic is required, and naturally numbers are common. However you then dig into it and also you begin to notice there are fuzzy points right here. So lots of the assumptions that underlie our interpretation of what we discovered about physics are that approach. I had this expertise that's in all probability quite common amongst physics undergrads in quantum mechanics, studying about these calculations the place you see 9 decimal locations within the concept and 9 decimal locations within the experiment, and also you go, “Whoa, this isn't just a few calculational device. That is how the universe decides what occurs to a particle.”
