Physics has long felt like a universal language, a set of truths any intelligent civilization would eventually discover. A physicist working at CERN and teaching at the University of California, Irvine is now questioning that assumption directly.
The argument, laid out in a new book titled Do Aliens Speak Physics?, is both straightforward and disorienting: the physics humans have built may reflect the structure of human minds as much as the structure of reality. Alien scientists, shaped by a different biology or culture, might construct something that works equally well but looks nothing like what exists in any textbook on Earth.
Physics Is Built on Choices
The case begins with a detail that physicists often gloss over. Every model in physics requires choices: what to include, what to ignore, what level of approximation is “good enough.” Predicting a comet’s path, for instance, could theoretically account for every gravitational interaction, the slow sublimation of ice, and the tumbling caused by an irregular shape. In practice, no one does that. Physicists decide what matters for the question at hand.
That selectivity runs through the entire discipline. Even the most precise theories rest on assumptions that make the mathematics workable rather than ones that are, in any fundamental sense, correct. The theories regarded as bedrock may simply be effective descriptions that happen to function at human scales.
If physics depends on choices about simplification and representation, then alien physicists might reasonably make entirely different ones and arrive at a framework that is equally valid but structurally unrecognizable.
The Problem of Time
The book uses a series of first-contact thought experiments to stress-test foundational assumptions. One of the most striking involves aliens who do not experience time as a flowing sequence. Human physics is built on the premise that causes precede effects, that the universe computes itself forward, moment by moment. The present generates the future.
Beings who perceive time as a complete, navigable structure rather than a linear progression would have no particular reason to build physics that way. Their mathematics of causality might be unrecognizable, yet still accurate.
That is not a fringe philosophical position. Quantum theory itself already struggles to explain how the familiar, cause-and-effect reality humans experience emerges from the underlying world of particles. The foundations of the discipline remain genuinely contested.
A Stronger Science, Not a Weaker One
The author is careful to separate this line of thinking from relativism. Recognizing that certain pillars of physics may be contingent, products of human cognition rather than necessary features of any possible science, does not make those pillars less useful. It may make physics better by forcing practitioners to examine which assumptions are truly load-bearing and which are inherited habits of thought.
Much of this perspective came from conversations with philosophers of science, a dialogue that physicists working at facilities like the Large Hadron Collider rarely prioritize. The exercise of imagining radically different minds doing science turns out to be a precise tool for examining what human science actually rests on.
Physics has been, by any measure, spectacularly successful. Whether that success reflects universal truth or a particularly powerful way of seeing remains an open question, one that may only become answerable if humanity ever has something else to compare itself to.
Photo by Олег Мороз on Unsplash
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