What if the aliens come and we just can't communicate?

"Science fiction has long speculated about the possibility of first contact with an alien species from a distant world and how we might be able to communicate with them. But what if we simply don't have enough common ground for that to even be possible? An alien species is bound to be biologically very different, and their language will be shaped by their home environment, broader culture, and even how they perceive the universe. They might not even share the same math and physics."

"Co-author Daniel Whiteson is a particle physicist at the University of California, Irvine, who has worked on the ATLAS collaboration at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. He's also a gifted science communicator who previously co-authored two books with cartoonist Jorge Cham of PhD Comics fame: 2018's We Have No Idea and 2021's Frequently Asked Questions About the Universe. (The pair also co-hosted a podcast from 2018 to 2024, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe.) This time around, cartoonist Andy Warner provided the illustrations, and Whiteson and Warner charmingly dedicate their book to "all the alien scientists we have yet to meet.""

"I'm not the kind of physicist who's like, 'whatever, let's just measure stuff,' The thing that always excited me about physics was this implicit promise that we were doing something universal, that we were learning things that were true on other planets. But the more I learned, the more concerned I became that this might have been oversold. None are fundamental, and we don't understand why anything emerges. Can we separate the human lens from the thing we're looking at? We don't know in the end how muc"

Speculation about first contact raises the problem of insufficient common ground for communication. Biological differences, home environments, culture, and perceptual frameworks can shape alien language and cognition. Mathematics and physics as known on Earth may not be universal or shared by other intelligences. The promise of physics as providing universal truths across planets faces challenges from emergence and human interpretive lenses. Fundamental principles may not be self-evident, and separating human conceptual frameworks from observed phenomena can be difficult. These issues complicate assumptions about shared scientific understanding with nonhuman intelligences.

Read at Ars Technica