Daniel Whiteson

Or organizing your desk, it makes you a more effective person or whatever.

Keeping a calendar is useful.

Well, not necessary.

You could get by without it.

Sure.

And what that tells you is aliens, maybe they don't have the same mental shortcuts.

If their minds work differently...

maybe they came up with another halfway point for their calculations, another convenience, another way that reflects the way they think about the universe, which could be the same as ours or could be very, very alien, right?

And so that opens the door to thinking about how elements of our science could reflect our humanity instead of reality.

And back to the question, is the Higgs boson real?

Well, I don't know if any of these fields are real.

I don't know if anything that we've described out there has to be the way we think about it.

Or it could just be that this is a way for us to express how our thoughts work.

Maybe this lens we thought was focusing on the universe is also reflecting something of ourselves.

So if aliens arrive and their physics or whatever they're doing, they're not using numbers, does that mean our number system, our tool is in the way?

Could we be limited by our own senses is what I'm kind of getting at.

Yeah, it could be, right?

It could be that it expresses the way that our minds work, but it could also be limiting, right?

It could be that it shunts us into certain ways of thinking about the universe.

It closes doors.