In his July 2016 editorial, Charles Day asks readers to imagine what extraterrestrial science might look like. Here’s my response:

Planet Q is cold and dark by our standards, but it is teeming with life. Its inhabitants are microscopic; so small, in fact, that their tiny eyes can see one photon at a time. With their hands they can feel a single atom. They experience a world of quantum jumps, where nothing is gradual or smooth. They do not think of time as a continuously flowing quantity because the only way they can detect its passage is through some kind of change, and all the changes they see are spontaneous and unpredictable. For them, time lurches forward in fits and starts.

Their advanced understanding of quantum mechanics has enabled them to produce sophisticated technology—what we would call nanotechnology. But their science is based on discrete mathematics and number theory; they would be puzzled by our concept of a smooth, differentiable curve. They would be surprised to learn about our Schrödinger equation because it leaves out the quantum jump, the most prominent feature of the physical world.

It would be hard to convince the inhabitants of Planet Q that such things as electromagnetic waves exist, although, of course, they have analogues of diffraction and interference in their own equations. It would be like telling a couple of ants crawling across a pointillistic painting that they are actually standing on a drawing of an umbrella. That would seem unnecessarily abstract to them: Why would you group together those dots and call them something else? If you understand photons, you have no need of an electromagnetic field.

And the residents of Planet Q really would not recognize our ray optics. Even terrestrial physicists agree that such a thing as a light ray does not exist, yet they nevertheless calculate its displacement and direction as it goes through a lens. Earth-bound scientists might patiently explain that the light ray is a convenient fiction, a calculational tool; however, the beings from planet Q have brains that work like quantum computers, so they have no need of such mental crutches.

By contrast, the Shadow people are unimaginably large, each blood cell larger than a solar system, their bodies the size of a galaxy. They move slowly, think slowly, and pay no attention to us. Their physics describes their kind of matter, dark matter, and does not include any details about our familiar electrons, protons, and neutrons, since they hardly interact with those particles.

Zooming out from our galaxy, we see our whole universe, and then a myriad of other universes, coming into existence and expanding like the bubbles in a pot of water that has just come to a boil. That is the multiverse. It was created as a science fair project by an alien being whose name roughly translates to Timmy. He mixed together what we might call—in a very crude analogy—chemicals and heated them on the stove. (The secret, his mom said, is to add just the right amount of inflatons.)

As the pot started to boil, Timmy’s eyes grew wide with delight. He leaned forward to take a closer look, and as our universe floated up, he said, “Wow!”—an exclamation that took, by our reckoning, 100 billion years.