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Comment by spullara | Hacker News Reader

Do you think that physics is somehow subjective? We absolutely would have decoded the message.

Physics is a model of reality. Reality is objective, but the model we have chosen is very much "subjective" (maybe arbitrary is a better term).

It's easy to imagine that another species might have never conceptualized electrons as little balls orbiting around a nucleus. They are neither balls nor are they flying in circles, those are simply abstractions we like because they appeal to the way we perceive reality. The way we conceptualize electrons leads to issues like the wave-particle duality, so it's likely just a local optimum we got stuck in. Another species might not even think of Electrons as being distinct entities, maybe they think of the electron field as one large ocean with some waves in it, or they subscribe to the single electron theory, or something we have never thought of and might never imagine from our perspective.

"Arbitrary" ("existing or coming about seemingly at random or by chance or as a capricious and unreasonable act of will", "based on or determined by individual preference or convenience rather than by necessity or the intrinsic nature of something" [1]) is a very poor term. Not only is physics highly constrained by what can be observed in the universe, it is also capable of demonstrating (when it is actually the case) equivalences between apparently dissimilar modes of presentation. It is not perfect, but can you present anything that does better?

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/arbitrary

> is physics highly constrained by what can be observed in the universe

It is also very highly constrained by how _we_ observe the universe. Beings with different sensory/cognitive capacities could develop very different models.

> equivalences between apparently dissimilar modes of presentation

If there was some mathematical equivalence between their models and ours, which is already a leap to assume, there is still a question about whether the specific measure used would be translated to something equivalent to our object length measure in their model, which gets much stronger than just some equivalence assumption. And it’s even stronger to assume that this equivalence could just be inferred without any other information apart from the disk.

It seems disproportionate to fuss about "a leap to assume..." when we are talking about a small plaque affixed to a probe on the highly speculative basis that something intelligent might one day retrieve it, as opposed to something that is mission-critical. Would we be better off for not making these "leaps"?

I was answering to a specific comment chain.

It would be a leap to assume another culture has something similar to (or, in some cases, anything resembling) one's ethics, sense of humor or taste in music. In comparison to these things, science has something they do not: apparently universal and impersonal 'laws', which, where we can check, appear to hold across the visible universe (putting aside some unresolved issues on the leading edge of our present knowledge.)

For some extra-solar civilization to examine the probe and its plaque intact, it will have to rendezvous with it in space. It seems to me to be the greater leap of faith to suppose this can be done without having knowledge that is isomorphic or equivalent to our formulation of orbital mechanics. Do you have any concrete ideas about how this might be so?

As a theoretical physicist, yes physics could definitely be subjective between different species. Physics is the way HUMANS describe nature to themselves. I don't doubt that it describes some greater nature outside of us that is invariant, but it is only a description - not the thing itself. Like mathematics it is an anthropocentric conceptualization that has many arbitrary and historically contingent choices in its choice of representation and its chosen objects of study.

How could we ever be certain than another intelligence (whatever that means) would be capable of understanding the intended message? Unless of course we are already starting off with the major assumption that the only things that can be intelligent are things like us. I'm not even sure that intelligent has any meaning aside from denoting behavior "similar to us".

If they could discover the probe at all and view the plaque, lots of things are already very similar.

Yeah perhaps, but its really hard to say anything concrete either way

Our understanding evolves, course corrects, spins off etc., we can use some static value as purported from the dark ages or by newtonian or later einstenian points of view. They all are measurably correct for the problems that they are trying to solve for the people who lived during those times. A million years from now would these values still be relevant or be considered as having the same value of importance or will they be replaced by even more finer and precise and contextually different values that could be more precise and more accurate etc.,

Indeed. Say, maybe a civilization didn't start out with trying to build the world of particles of progressively finer size, but started directly with a model of fields, waves and charges and therefore never had a concept of a discrete elemental particle, and in turn a system built around that to categorize elements.

Or to them, an atom is as large an arbitrary macro structure as proteins are to us, and so they would never consider two empty circles with a single line to represent something so big and chaotic. Or maybe they had the crazy idea of building everything of vibrating strings!

Who knows what the abstractions and approximations would be when the foundation of it all isn't "getting hit on the head by an apple".

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