Imagine, one day, that life shows up on another planet. Moreover, it’s intelligent life. Imagine, too, that we’ve a reasonably swift means of communication. We’d need a common language with which to talk. What might that language be? One candidate would be mathematics.
Mathematics seems to be a universal language. Science presumes as much: it works as a descriptive and predictive tool, both on the small scale and at the very large. Moreover, it works for systems that are very close and quite distant — so distant that they reach back to the earliest moments after the Big Bang. And when you stop to think about it, that’s quite remarkable.
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