Would Aliens Do Physics, or is Science a Human Invention?
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
Modern physics offers a remarkable lens on reality. In just over a century, it has decoded the architecture of atoms, traced the early history of the universe and produced laws that seem to hold everywhere, from Earth's crust to distant galaxies. It is tempting to believe that these theories aren't just accurate, but inevitable - that any sufficiently intelligent civilisation would eventually uncover the same truths.
I used to believe that, too. But lately I have started to wonder whether physics is less a window onto universal reality and more of a mirror, reflecting the particular kind of minds we happen to have.
That unsettling thought emerges when you ask a deceptively simple question: would alien scientists, shaped by a different biology or culture, arrive at the same physics that we have? Or might they develop something that works just as well, but looks utterly foreign - built on concepts and assumptions we would struggle to recognise?
This question sits at the heart of my book, Do Aliens Speak Physics?, which imagines various scenarios of first contact, each designed to probe a foundational assumption of modern physics. In developing it - often in conversation with philosophers of science - I have come to realise something surprising: many pillars of physics that feel hardwired may actually be contingent. But recognising that doesn't weaken science. It may be how we make it better.
I've spent my life doing physics. When I am not teaching at the University of California, Irvine, I work at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, analysing data from the Large Hadron Collider. But a few years ago, conversations with philosophers forced me to revisit a question I hadn't seriously considered since my student days: what is physics, really?
At its core, physics aims to explain how the universe works - not just what we observe, but what lies behind those observations. It looks for patterns, builds models that expose hidden structure and, ideally, distils everything down to a small set of rules from which the rest follows. By that measure, it has been spectacularly successful.
Yet physics never describes the universe in full. It describes carefully chosen versions of it.
Consider predicting the path of a comet. In principle, we could account for every gravitational tug, the slow loss of material as ice sublimates, even the way an irregular shape causes the comet to tumble. In practice, we must decide what to include and what to ignore. There is no single correct model - only models that are good enough for the question at hand.
This is true throughout physics. Even our most precise theories rely on approximations and assumptions that make the mathematics tractable. And it isn't clear that the theories we treat as fundamental really are. They may simply be effective descriptions that work at human scales. There is no guarantee that, by probing nature ever more finely, we will eventually strike bedrock.
If physics depends on choices - about simplification, representation and emphasis - then alien physicists might reasonably make different ones.
Imagine that aliens arrive on Earth. They have mastered interstellar travel and touched down near Paris. We send linguists and scientists to greet them, hoping for a technological windfall. The delegation returns empty-handed.
"They can't share their technology," the lead physicist explains. "Because of what will happen 74 years from today."
The implication is disturbing. These aliens don't experience time as a flowing sequence, but as a complete structure, something navigable rather than endured. Human physics, by contrast, is built on the idea that the present generates the future. Causes precede effects. The universe computes itself forward, moment by moment.
But what if that picture is a human convenience, rather than a cosmic necessity?
We know that any workable physics must obey certain constraints. A universe that allows unrestricted messages from the future quickly collapses into a paradox. But within those limits, the structure of time may be more flexible than we usually admit.
Hints of this already exist in our own theories. Quantum entanglement links distant particles so that measuring one appears to instantaneously fix the state of the other, despite the fact that there can be no information exchanged between them. This alone strains our intuitions. But matters become stranger when relativity enters the picture. Observers moving at different speeds disagree about the order of events. In some frames of reference, one measurement appears to influence another before it occurs.
The standard response is to insist that nothing physically problematic has happened: no faster-than-light signals, no causal contradictions. But that reassurance relies on clinging tightly to a classical notion of causality that quantum mechanics has never fully respected.
Some physicists have taken a more radical approach. In so-called retrocausal interpretations of quantum mechanics, future events are allowed to help shape the present. Measurements don't merely reveal outcomes; they help define them, even backwards in time. The universe no longer computes itself strictly step by step.
If aliens had a radically different construct of time, they might adopt such ideas naturally, rather than treating them as unsettling exceptions. And perhaps we may eventually need to do the same.
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