by Ben Miller
CLEOPATRA’S NOODLES
This, in case you were wondering, is the point where Jean-François Champollion comes in. A few months after his return from Egypt, the great mathematician Fourier took up residence in Grenoble. Like the other savants, Fourier styled himself as “Un Egyptien” and remained obsessed with all things ancient, including the hieroglyphs. When inspecting one of the local schools, he was so impressed by the linguistic abilities of a twelve-year-old student named Champollion that he invited him to his study to show him some of his Egyptian antiquities. Learning that none of the inscriptions could be understood, Champollion declared his intention to decipher the hieroglyphs.
Not that it was easy. Part of the problem, as Champollion was to discover, was that the third script on the stone, known as Demotic, was virtually unknown in academic circles. With little progress being made with the hieroglyphs themselves, the logical step seemed to be the translation of the Demotic, but that too proved a stubborn problem. A later form of Egyptian script, Coptic, was better known, and appeared to be derived from Demotic, and Champollion made it his business to become fluent in it.
Unknown to Champollion, however, he had a rival. Thomas Young was a trained physician and polymath, probably best known for proving that light is a wave by means of an experiment known as Young’s Slits.13 Fluent in a baffling number of languages, Young was late to the Rosetta Stone but quickly made up for lost ground. Focusing on the cartouches as the means to crack the code, he made a thrilling deduction. Knowing that the Ancient Greek and the Demotic scripts contained the name of Ptolemy, he set about trying to find the relevant cartouche among the hieroglyphs.
His reasoning was simple. Although believing, as everyone did at the time, that hieroglyphs were ideogrammatic, while the Demotic script was phonetic, he couldn’t help noticing that some of the Demotic letters appeared to be derived from hieroglyphs. Could it be that some of the hieroglyphs represented sounds rather than ideas? If that was true, then those sounds would almost certainly be used to spell out a foreign name like Ptolemy. Sure enough, he found a cartouche which seemed to do the trick, and assigned the following letter sounds:
Unfortunately for Young, he remained convinced that the Egyptian names—and the rest of the hieroglyphs—were ideograms, not phonograms, and so made little further progress. Reading of Young’s success, however, Champollion was inspired. Counting the characters on the Rosetta Stone, he found that 486 words of the Greek script were matched by 1,419 hieroglyphs. Grouping the hieroglyphs as best he could, he found that the total number of these “words” was roughly 180. Clearly something was amiss. Could it be that Ancient Egyptian was much more complex than anyone had imagined, and contained a mix of “picture” glyphs and “sound” glyphs?
The final key was provided not by the Rosetta Stone, but by an obelisk obtained by the British adventurer William Bankes. Discovered in the Temple of Isis on the sacred island of Philae in the Nile, near Aswan, the fallen obelisk and the base from which it had become detached had already made an appearance in the Description de l’Egypte. When it arrived in England in the summer of 1821, Bankes realized that a Greek inscription on the base contained the names of Ptolemy VIII and Cleopatra III, and that one of the two cartouches within the hieroglyphs matched that for Ptolemy in the Rosetta Stone. Could the other cartouche be that of Cleopatra?
Excitedly, Bankes had a lithograph printed of both the Greek and Ancient Egyptian inscriptions, and sent a copy to Young. Unable to make any progress, Young decided that the copy was inexact and abandoned any attempt at translation. Another found its way into the hands of Champollion in France, however, who checked first that the cartouche for Ptolemy matched that on the Rosetta Stone. It did. Disregarding Young’s original letter sounds, Champollion came up with the following:
Turning to the second cartouche, he immediately recognized four of the glyphs:
Assuming that the others must also be phonograms, and that the same sound could be represented by more than one phonogram, he assigned them the following values:14
He then applied himself to a third cartouche:
Knowing six of the glyphs, he was able to deduce the name of Alexander the Great:
By 1824, Champollion had cracked virtually the entirety of hieroglyphics. Publishing his findings in the sensational Précis du Système Hiéroglyphique, he showed that there were actually three types of glyphs: ideograms, phonograms, and determinatives. It was phonograms, not ideograms, that made up the heart and soul of the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs; in fact, there was some interplay between the two, since the consonants that made up an ideogram could also be used as a form of phonogram.
To give one example: The ideogram for a scarab beetle, as in the case of Thutmose III’s cartouche, can represent the idea “that which will be” or the three consonants “hpr.” This was confusing even to the Ancient Egyptians, which is where determinatives come in. Placed after a phonogram, they let you know the sense of a word. The phonograms for chmplln, for example, might be followed by the determinative for a man showing that they spelled “champollion.”15
WE ARE NOT ALONE
Contrary to the hopes of Champollion and others, our studies of the Ancient Egyptian texts have not made us adept in divine secrets, or shown us how life originated on Earth. Instead, they have intimately connected us with one of the first civilizations, revealing both its cruelty and its wisdom, its economic power and moral weakness. Considering that we are separated by over five thousand years of cultural evolution, we and the Ancient Egyptians are remarkably alike. The closeness of that bond is not only rewarding in its own right, but hints at another, equally close kinship with the humans that migrated to the Levant from sub-Saharan Africa. But for writing, we are all strangers.
The worldwide mania that followed the discovery of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics no doubt has its parallels in how the international community would react to the detection of an alien signal. There will be people who expect it to contain the secrets of the universe, of technologies beyond our wildest imagination: the final fulfillment of our blocked wish for unbounded energy, perhaps; time travel; maybe even an end to world poverty. What we find in it will almost certainly be something different. Whatever it is, like the deciphering of the hieroglyphs, it will dissolve many of the physical boundaries between our cultures. In short, we will not be alone.
Like the hieroglyphs, however, any message we do detect will be unbearably hard to decode. Ancient Egyptian society, being more technologically primitive than ours, might have produced a more simple form of writing, but it did not. The complexity of the hieroglyphs speaks to a different kind of literacy from that we are used to today, one where the very act of writing was a divine act, where symbolism and literalism collided as violently as they do in, say, Ulysses by James Joyce. Modern English, for example, readily submits to digitization, becoming a string of 1s and 0s with little lost in the way of meaning. Could such a highly visual language as Ancient Egyptian be encoded as faithfully? Our languages have become more pliant, certainly, but drained as they are of visual symbolism, have they become less poetic?
Finally, the great lesson of the hieroglyphs is the crucial part played by the Rosetta Stone. Without knowing the content of at least some part of a message, we have no way to decode it. When we talk to aliens, what will we use in its place? After all, in the case of the hieroglyphs we shared enough culture with the Ancient Egyptians to know what a scarab beetle looked like, for example, or that the Sun takes the shape of a circle. What do we do when the life-forms on the end of the phone are giant centipedes that communicate via chemical odors, or gelatinous-tendrilled air-dwelling balloons that signal using bioluminescence?
RADIO GA GA
Thankfully, there is one obvious candidate for a Rosetta Stone, and we don’t need to go digging for it in the dunes of a future desert planet: the physics and mathematics required to build a radio telescope. We may not share body parts, or culture, or even the same biochemistry, but in order t
o send us a radio message our alien callers will at least share our penchant for radio technology. And that in turn means they will have at least the same understanding of mathematics and physics as we do.16
Just as we assume the aliens will broadcast in the least noisy part of the spectrum, we are fairly safe in assuming that they will begin their message with some form of Rosetta Stone. The most common element in the universe is hydrogen, so why not start there? They could kick off with the charge on the electron, for example, closely followed by the mass of a proton, then seal the deal with the speed of light. The problem, of course, is that to put a number to such things, intelligent creatures need a system of measurement. That in turn requires some kind of unit, and it’s not that likely that the Kepler 452f-ians are using the foot, second, and pound. Which is where some rather ingenious things called dimensionless numbers come in.
A dimensionless number is one that has no units, and is therefore the same whatever measurement system you choose. You already know one: pi, being the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter. Pi crops up everywhere from General Relativity to Quantum Mechanics, and would no doubt be as handy to alien mathematicians as it is to earthbound ones.17 Most people could probably tell you the value of pi to three decimal places, being 3.142, or that it is approximately equal to 22/7. But to physicists there is another number that is just as famous: 137.
That—or, rather, its inverse, 1/137—is the approximate value of what is known as the fine-structure constant,. This enigmatic number describes the tendency for an electron to emit or absorb a photon, and while it is fundamental to a quantum mechanical description of electromagnetism—and therefore, the manufacture and operation of radio dishes—no one has the faintest idea where it comes from. And it’s not alone. The gravitational coupling constant, αG, would also be as familiar to alien physicists as the name of Cleopatra to the Ancient Egyptians. To those we can add such gems as the ratio of a proton mass to an electron mass, and the ratio of a neutron mass to a proton mass, all of which will be well known in alien worlds just as they are here.
Even with a Rosetta Stone in the form of basic physics, decoding the rest of an alien radio message will be fiendishly difficult. After all, it took some of the brightest minds on the planet twenty-three years to effect a translation of the hieroglyphs. To be successful we will need both brilliant scientists like Thomas Young, and equally gifted linguists such as Jean-François Champollion. The incipient age of interstellar communication will require a coming together not just of the sciences, but also the arts.
In the meantime, however, what do we look for? The practical answer is simple: any kind of transmission for which there is no known natural source. Like Jocelyn Bell Burnell, we will turn up a few pulsars along the way, but we will be all the richer for that. For the savants, the Ancient Egyptian monuments of Rome hinted that somewhere out there lurked the collected wisdom of an entire civilization. In the quest for extraterrestrial intelligence, we ourselves are that hint. Assuming we do find some kind of unidentified transmitted signal, what then? Amazingly, even with no Rosetta Stone, all is not lost. And the story starts in the most unlikely of places: with Ulysses by James Joyce.
THE BLOOMSDAY BOOK
First serialized in the American journal The Little Review, James Joyce’s Ulysses is rightly considered the masterpiece of literary modernism.18 Everything about it defies convention. Its narrative, if you can call it that, might be summed up as “two men go for a walk in Dublin, and very little happens.” Virtuosic, untrammeled, ruthlessly academic, and intentionally obscene, Ulysses is about as idiosyncratic a text as you can imagine, dispensing with all the preexisting conventions of character, speech, style, comprehensibility, and believability. It is exhilarating to read, at the same time unlocking the gilded cage of form and imprisoning you with its vaulting genius.
Yet as anarchic and free-flowing as it appears, when it comes to its underlying structure, Ulysses is subject to the most rigid of rules. As first noticed by the Harvard linguist George Kingsley Zipf in his 1949 masterpiece Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort, when submitted to statistical analysis, Ulysses is indistinguishable not only from one of the texts to which it alludes,19 Homer’s Iliad, but also to the Old English poem Beowulf, four Latin plays of Plautus, and the language of the Plains Cree Indians. To cut to the chase, if you take all the different words in Ulysses, count how often they occur and then rank them in order, you start to see something extraordinary.
To see what I mean, take a look at the chunk of Ulysses that appears at the beginning of this chapter. To really see the pattern, you need to analyze the text as a whole, but all we are after here is the gist. It’s fairly easy to see which word crops up the most: it’s the rather unprepossessing “of,” which I count as appearing twenty-one times. Next is the equally un-Joycey “the,” which crops up eleven times. After that we have “in” at seven times, and “and” at five times . . . by which point you may have picked up the pattern. The second most frequent word occurs half as many times as the first most frequent; the third most frequent, a third as many; the fourth, a quarter. In short, if we define the rank of a word to be its place in the pecking order, and its frequency to be the number of times it appears, we can write:
rank = constant/frequency
It surprises me all over again just telling you, so to convince us both let’s take a look at the data that Zipf presents in Human Behavior. This is the point at which a table comes in handy, so here goes:
Word
Rank
Frequency
I
10
2,653
say
100
265
bag
1,000
26
orangefiery
10,000
2
Even more strangely, it doesn’t end with written texts and spoken languages. Turning to data from the Sixteenth United States Census, conducted in 1940, Zipf showed that the same relationship applied for the population of cities, the number of shops within a city, and the wages of the citizens within them. In other words, the tenth most populated city had a tenth of the population of the first most populated, and the one hundredth richest man had a hundredth of the wealth of the richest. What could all of this possibly mean?
To this day, no one is exactly sure. Anyone and everyone in practically every field of the humanities has had a crack at Zipf’s law, and no one explanation has yet garnered a decisive following.20 As the title of his book suggests, Zipf’s own suggestion was that it is something to do with that universal human maxim “anything for an easy life.” Why go out of your way to shop on the main street when the supermarket on the outside of town has everything that you need and more? Why hire another actor when Tom Cruise is available? Why use DuckDuckGo when you’ve got Google?
Of course, when it comes to language, two things quickly make you lose the will to live. The first is when too many sounds are repeated, as anyone who has been on a long car journey with a three-year-old can attest. The other, as you will know from trying to speak French on holiday, is when there are too many different sounds to be able to tell them apart. Zipf saw language as a trade-off between these two extremes, a middle ground where the balance—weighted somewhere toward shorter words that are easy to say and understand—was just about perfect. Whatever the case, it seems that Zipf’s law is a necessary-but-not-sufficient property of language. And most fascinatingly for our story, in 1999 three researchers named Laurance Doyle, Brenda McCowan, and Sean Hanser found that Zipf’s law applies to the whistles of bottlenose dolphins.21
THE ORDER OF THE DOLPHIN
SETI has a long history of research into dolphin communication. One of the ten attendees at the first SETI conference at Green Bank in 1961 was the neuroscientist John Lilly. His book of that year, Man and Dolphin, had been an international bestseller, and claimed not only that dolphins were capable of complex emotions, but that they might also be capable of
speaking human languages.
Lilly’s book had caught the attention of Frank Drake, who wanted to understand the potential challenges of communicating with other intelligent species. Lilly, with his boundless charisma and movie star looks, was an instant hit. Not only were the brains of bottlenose dolphins larger than ours, he informed the conference, but they were just as densely packed with neurons; in fact, parts of their brains looked even more complex than their human counterparts.
What’s more, dolphins appeared to have their own language. Using tapes he had recorded at his new purpose-built Communication Research Institute on the island of St Thomas in the Virgin Islands, he demonstrated how bottlenose dolphins were able to communicate with one another with whistling sounds that they made using their blowholes. If he slowed the tapes down, he showed, the dolphins’ squeaks and clicks even sounded like human language. Might it be possible to teach them to speak English?
Later, Frank Drake was to come to the reluctant conclusion that Lilly’s work was “poor science,” and that he had probably distilled hours of recordings to find those little bits that made their speech sound humanlike. At the time, however, Lilly’s findings were enthralling, providing just a taste of the non-human intelligence that they were all seeking. Only Philip Morrison offered a note of skepticism, observing that dolphins, intelligent as they were, couldn’t build telescopes with flippers.
On disbanding, the group decided to call themselves “The Order of the Dolphin.” A few weeks later, Frank Drake received a small package in the mail from Melvin Calvin.22 An identical package was addressed to Struve, and Drake later learned that each conference participant had received one. Inside the box was a silver badge, a replica of an Ancient Greek coin in the shape of a leaping dolphin. The badge was a reminder that not only had they formed their own fraternity, but that in admiring the intelligence of dolphins they were honoring an academic tradition that went back to the Ancient Greeks.