Would space aliens see the world as we do? with Daniel Whiteson

Imagine we eventually meet some alien scientists. If they can see electrons or smell photons, would their science look like ours? Is physics a universal language, or just a local dialect of the human brain? Would aliens use math, or might their truths be organized unrecognizably? Are the “laws of nature” really laws, or simply our interpretations? Join Eagleman with particle physicist Daniel Whiteson, author of the new book “Do Aliens Speak Physics?”

Episode Audio

Episode Video

More Information:

Daniel Whiteson & Andy Warner. Do Aliens Speak Physics?: And Other Questions about Science and the Nature of Reality.

David Eagleman. “The Umwelt”. In This Will Make You Smarter (Edge Question Series)

Hartry Field. Science without Numbers.

David Eagleman. Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. (The limitations of our senses)

David Eagleman. Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain. (How to expand our senses)

The Wow! signal (Wikipedia)
Rashomon (movie)

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"[A] neuroscientist and polymath."
- Wall Street Journal

"David Eagleman may be the best combination of scientist and fiction-writer alive."
- Stewart Brand

"David Eagleman offers startling lessons.... His method is to ask us to cast off our lazy commonplace assumptions.
- The Guardian

"A popularizer of impressive gusto...[Eagleman] aims, grandly, to do for the study of the mind what Copernicus did for the study of the stars."
- New York Observer

"What Eagleman seems to be calling for is a new Enlightenment."
- Sunday Herald

"David Eagleman is the kind of guy who really does make being a neuroscientist look like fun."
- New York Times

"Eagleman has a talent for testing the untestable, for taking seemingly sophomoric notions and using them to nail down the slippery stuff of consciousness."
- The New Yorker

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