Most Mathemeticians Prepared to Meet Extra-Terrestrials
I find it fascinating that the average mathemetician is prepared to meet with extra-terrestrials, and has a plan of what he wants to communicate if ever called upon to do so.
“The ideal mathemetician feels prepared, should the occasion arise, to meet an extragalactic intelligence.” This is according to mathemeticians Philip J. Davis, and Reuben Hersh, authors of the current book I am reading, The Mathematical Experience. It is a book of essays about math designed to make math accessible to the layman, and it really does so.
According to Davis and Hersh, most mathemeticians’ “first effort to communicate would be to write down (or otherwise transmit) the first few hundred digits in the binary expansion of pi. He regards it as obvious that any intelligence capable of intergalactic communication would be mathematical and that it makes sense to talk about mathematical intelligence apart from the thoughts and actions of human beings. Moereover, he regards it as obvious that binary representation and the real number pi are both part o the intrinsic order o fthe universe.”
Furthermore, “he will admit that neither of them is a natural object, but he wil insist that they are discovered, not invented. Their discovery, in something like the form in which we know them, is inevitable if one rises far enough above the primoridial slime to communicate with other galaxies (or even with other solar systems).”
The authors propose the idea that some might ask, “Wouldn’t life and death, love and hate, joy and despair be messages more likely to be universal than a dry pedantic formula that nobody but you and a few hundred of your type will know, from a hen-scratch in a farmyard?”
To which the average mathemetican might respond, “The reason that my formulas are appropriate for intergalactic communication is the same reason that they are not very suitable for terrestrial comunication. their content is not earthbound. It is free of the specifically human.”
If you are the least bit interested in understanding math from a layman’s conceptual point of view, this book is full of interesting essays full of food for thought, that are often highly entertaining.
Margot
Tags: Add new tag, Reuben Hersh, The Mathematical Experience
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October 5, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Wow, Margot, I love your site! Keep up the great work!
Anthony
October 13, 2008 at 5:10 pm
I agree with the mathematicians!
January 20, 2009 at 7:41 pm
Instead of initiating communication with any possible alien intelligence with the help of a binary representation of the value of Pi, why not we use diagrammatical representations to showcase our basic mathematical concepts which could be very effective in breaking down the “intergalactic language barrier” we might face. How can we be so sure that the aliens would be able to understand the “mathematical expressions” we would be using to express any concepts or values even if they were of universal significance?
January 21, 2009 at 7:31 pm
I wondered about that, too! I wondered HOW mathemeticians thought they could translate pi to an alien intelligence, such as by writing down numbers which they wouldn’t understand, by sound pulses, by light pulses, by taps; but none of that was specified by the mathemetician who wrote the book I read. It is a valid pint, to be sure.
February 16, 2009 at 2:49 pm
We could simply do like Archimedes did (supposedly) on his tombstone: draw a circle into a cylinder, then let aliens think for themselves, and PI should result…
February 16, 2009 at 4:55 pm
I think that’s pretty neat! I never heard that.
Margot