Is mathematics a universal language? Not only is this universality often postulated but also it was said -- some decades back -- that devices were broadcasting into space the intial decimal digits of pi, expecting that other intelligent beings would surely recognize the sequence of digits. Robert Gethner examines this arrogance in a poem.
The Universal Language by Robert Gethner
For G. G.
“We think we have written the message [on the plaque on the space probe Pioneer 10]
in a universal language. The extraterrestrials cannot possibly understand English or
Russian or Chinese or Esperanto, but they must share with us common mathematics
and physics and astronomy.”
– Carl Sagan, The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective
We send out primes, triangles, digits
of pi---secret alphabets, quirks
and enigmas of my beloved trade
---hoping that some lonely, three-eyed
traveler from another star will find them
a million years hence and think of us.
But I wonder. Even among humans
mathematics is far from universal. Watch
this potter, shaping with her sensitive hands
an inert lump of clay on the wheel
into sensuous, living ripples. She never liked
math---as she’s told me ruefully more than once.
But see the intelligence in those confident
hands, the focused intention adjusting,
adapting, yielding to the feel of the clay,
the delicate progress toward beauty,
the improbable yet harmonious appositions
of unequationed surfaces, convex, concave,
the spontaneous yet watchful groping
toward some new form implicit
in the clay---not so different from a
mathematician's work of molding, shaping,
reshaping, polishing equations till they sparkle
with ethereal truth. Imagine the sum
total of all possible states
of awareness that the universe
has to offer (exultation at receiving
a smile from just this woman
whose eyes are just this shade of hazel;
the particular amalgam that we feel, in the first
Brahms piano concerto, of tenderness
and troubled majesty…not to mention
mental states of the three-eyed);
think of all the different intricate mixtures
of thought and emotion that sentient beings
might conceivably experience; think
of all those states as an immense ocean;
then surely there are waters
where we'll never swim, and yet, here we are,
thriving, more or less, in our harbor,
while the three-eyed do pretty well in their
separate seas. They're potters---I forgot
to tell you that---who never liked math,
nor had the chance. No Newton, not even
a Cardano, has arisen to grace
or trouble their continual state of languid
half-dream, a distant variant of which
we experience perhaps once
a year, when, dozing on a fall day
with sunshine full on our closed eyes, we hear
speech in the scratch and tap of an oak leaf
descending along a trunk. Yet they stay in touch
across great swaths of space with what we'd call
radio waves, fashioned as a potter would,
without the tools of my beloved trade,
by dreaming, whirling, prodding,
by shaping space with their gentle, frond-like wings
not like hands, yet not so unlike, either.
"The Universal Language" was originally published in Mathematics Magazine 82 (2009), 226.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Seeking a universal language
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