In a solar system in a totally different galaxy, would their books on math, physics and chemistry be identical to ours

In My Humble Opinion
1

I assume this is a question, not a debate. But if I’m wrong, feel free to move it.

But for example with chemistry, they would have something like a periodic table, even though the isotopic ratios would probably be different. But carbon would still form 4 bonds.

They would I assume have the same physics equations, even though their values for their local solar system for mass, radius, gravitational acceleration, density etc would be different. But wouldn’t the underlying equations be the same?

Would math be the same? Would they have discovered totally different fields of math, or would they have pursued the same fields of math as we did?

2

It’s a good question. Are there elements that exist on exoplanets that we’ve not discovered yet?

3

No.

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4

I mean, it’s not like there are holes in the periodic table or anything, and the laws of physics work the same way everywhere else in the universe, but the environmental conditions under which an alien race evolved would definitely impact their understanding of science.

Spoilers for the book/movie Project Hail Mary;

Rocky, the crablike alien in the story, is from a planet in the 40 Eridani system which is larger than Earth and has a much denser atmosphere. As a result, no visible light from the planet’s sun reaches the surface and they evolved without eyes, relying on echolocation to “see”, so they have no conception of color and describe things by texture instead - what humans call “green” they describe as “medium-rough”. Their math is base-6 because they have five ambidextrous limbs with three fingers each, any of which can be used as either a foot or arm, and prefer to stand on three limbs while using the other two for handling tools. Their native environment is significantly hotter than Earth’s, but the increased pressure also means the boiling point of water is much higher. They never developed computers because silicon chips aren’t viable in that environment, and also never discovered relativity or cosmic radiation, because the dense atmosphere stops cosmic rays from reaching the surface. OTOH, their brains evolved as essentially inorganic crystalline lattices that function more like computers than human brains, so they have photographic memories and complex math is extremely simple for them.

5

I would expect that there would be many difference, if for nothing else based on possible different biologies.

For example, fields like Organic chemistry spend a lot of time factoring in chirality of molecules, and the huge difference it brings in how they react. Which is (duh) very important to carbon based organisms dependent on CHON.

If we had a hypothetical silicon, or even more “exotic” based chemistry as aliens, then those studies may be niche, undeveloped, or otherwise ignored.

Not to say they may not know of them at all, but certainly their textbooks would be different!

6

Maybe if they are better at making/finding transuranic elements that we are, but if so- only in the laboratory.

Yes, same elements, same basic laws of physics.

7

Moderating:

At the request of the OP, this is moved to IMHO.

8

my understanding is pretty much everything heavier than plutonium is intelligently made and not naturally occurring since they aren’t stable.

9

Except maybe in weird stars- but not on planets. Unless very very weird and very radioactive.

10

The plot driver in the short story Omnilingual:

They might use a different base depending on how many extremities they have that are convenient to count on…

11

Right. I should have known that. Obviously it’s been far too long since I took a science class in school.

12

Books? What’s a book? Odds are they would experience reality in an entirely alien way. They might understand the same laws of the universe we do but in an entirely different way.

13

Mathematics is a vest area with many topics that have developed over the centuries. Ancient Greek mathematicians knew nothing about graph theory which was largely created by Euler in the 18th century. Euler knew nothing about transfinite analysis which was largely created by Cantor in the 19th century. Cantor knew nothing about category theory which was largely created in the 20th century. Undoubtedly there are many areas of mathematics yet to be discovered which we know nothing about today.

Alien mathematics may have developed in a different order, so that it includes some of those areas currently unknown to us, and omits some of the areas that we know about. But in the areas where our mathematics overlaps theirs, I think they would be substantially the same.

14

Very radioactive means that they last for a very short time before decaying into something else.

15

Also, elements exist in different levels of abundance in different regions of space, so worlds could form with different compositions than ours.

For example, one theoretical type of planet is a “carbon planet”, which has less oxygen than our and therefore very different mineralogy and no free oxygen. Any life that evolved there would both be exotic, and exist in an environment where oxygen chemistry would be a niche subject instead of an unavoidable fact of life.

Or for another example, there’s speculation that life could evolve using sulfuric acid instead of water as its liquid component. Whatever life evolved that way would by necessity be radically different in its chemistry.

Species on such worlds would have a lot of overlapping chemical knowledge of course, but they’d also be largely ignoring areas that are important to us while probably putting a lot of effort into what would be to us fairly exotic or useless chemistry.

16

Physics the same. Chemistry is just applied QED, so also the same. We can reasonably assume that they are not an antimatter critter. So even the margins of reality should be the same. Whilst chirality is, we assume, a random choice, the rules remain the same.

You might buy an argument about mathematics. The essentials are going to be much the same. Very hard to imagine there can be anything other than the basics of pretty much anything you will see up to the end of an undergraduate mathematics degree.

The order, and emphasis may be different. But if anyone is doing physics, engineering, science of most kinds, the tools won’t be different in nature.

It does bring up the question of whether mathematics is invented or discovered. Which is why it might buy an argument. Discovery suggests everyone in the universe will find the same things.

It isn’t impossible that a different fundamental basis of some area of mathematics underpins an alternative. But something that is becoming better understood is how there is a common basis that allows us to view them as simply different sides of the same coin. There are lots of areas that we now understand to be equivalent in a deep manner. There isn’t necessarily a one true road to calculus, but the tools, once derived, are hard to argue with.

They probably don’t have a theory of computation based on Turing Machines. But they will have an equivalent theory that you could prove is the same thing via appropriate transformations. Such as Lambda Calculus. So Turning invented his machine, but the fundamental theories of computability were discovered and are equivalent no matter what the underlying mechanics are.

It isn’t impossible that the mathematical tools of some aspects of fundamental physics (GR, QFT) could be expressed with significantly different mechanics. Accidents of history partly inform the tools we have. We are still trying to work out the basics of reality, so maybe the order of mathematics available leads to a different order of exploration of mathematical physics with better, worse, or just plain different outcomes for an alien species.

So those areas where we are still discovering stuff will be where we would expect diversity.

17

Physics and chemistry would presumably be the same. As far as we know the basic laws and constants of physics are universal.

Mind you, if one wants to get philosophically phenomenological, it has to be admitted that our reasons for believing that are somewhat indirect. We don’t have an actual piece of Alpha Centauri here in the lab. It’s based on observations of electromagnetic radiation we receive, and things like spectroscopy.

But the evidence seems pretty solid; unless we are making assumptions so fundementally wrong that we can’t even conceive of how or why we are wrong…

The periodic table seems to be complete (at least to extent that there are no unknown ‘holes’ in it). So the idea of a ‘metal that’s not even in our periodic table’ which used to appear in SF stories in the past, is bunk. There’s always the ‘island of stability’, I suppose. But I sometimes have the rather depressing thought that we’ve already seen that: it’s uranium and thorium…

Math is a bit more slippery. Using a different base because you have a different arrangement of appendages is unimportant, of course: arithmetic is the same whatever base you use. But would aliens have invented the idea of imaginary numbers, I wonder? They might have some different concept which serves the same purpose for arriving at solutions. And when you get into higher math, beyond undergrad level, I imagine different pathways are quite plausible…?

18

“Stability” is relative. It may mean isotopes that have a half-life of 1/100th of a second instead of 1/10,000th of a second like nearby isotopes. I doubt there is anything stable stable. (And if there was we would probably have already found a few atoms of it by now.)

19

Yes, the old idea that there might be heavier elements that are stable on human timescales, and even perhaps technologically useful, seems to have been abandoned?

On other paths: suppose a benign Elder Race has gifted us with an ansible and is willing to reply to questions —

Us: Have you unified General Relativity and Quantum mechanics yet?

Them: We had to refer this question to our historians. We remember those theories much as you remember phlogiston. They are no longer considered useful.

Us: All right. Have you proved the Riemann hypothesis yet?

Them: … embarrassed cough… errr…

20

“Minutes or days”, not fractions of a second.

Estimates of the stability of the nuclides within the island are usually around a half-life of minutes or days; some optimists propose half-lives on the order of millions of years.

If such elements are possible we haven’t found them because as far as we know, there’s no natural means of producing them.

No. it’s just really hard to make such elements if they exist.

There’s even a theorized “continent of stability”.

The continent of stability is a hypothesised large group of nuclides with masses greater than 300 daltons that is stable against radioactive decay, consisting of freely flowing up quarks and down quarks rather than up and down quarks bound into protons and neutrons. Matter containing these nuclides is termed up-down quark matter (udQM).[1] The continent of stability is named in analogy with the island of stability. However, if it exists, the range of charge and mass will be much greater than in the island.