What is Language?
The year is 2024. For the past three years, scientists have been watching the merger between BBU+08 3423 and YET 87058, neutron stars with orbits that have been encroaching on one another for hundreds of thousands of years. The LIGO and VIRGO gravitational-wave detectors prepare to observe and triangulate the signal from the distant stars, hoping to find information on the quark-gluon plasma and potential strange matter that lie beneath the surface. The stars had finally unified, becoming a black hole. As the scientists piece together the data, they uncover an interaction never before seen between two stars. Let us look at that interaction now:
“Hey, John?”
“What the hell is it now Carla?” He snapped, anxious and exasperated.
The sudden dimming of X-rays along her backside indicated her dejection. John quickly regretted his curtness but remained silent.
“I d-don’t feel good. I don’t want to die. I want to k-keep on flying through space, talking with you forever.”
John felt a pang of sadness. He was unbelievably terrified, but he didn’t want Carla to be. “Well… Maybe we can continue talking after death,” he said, clearly pulling it out of his coronal hole.
“You know I’m not religious, John.”
“No… I mean, we are talking to each other right now. What is to say that other entities can’t? Like planets, black holes, or even humans?”
Carla chuckled. “Humans aren’t conscious; don’t be silly. Even if they were, their language would be so different we wouldn’t understand them.”
“I think they do speak our language.” John improvised, “We inhabit the same universe, feel the same forces, and are made of the same elementary particles. We communicate with gravity, but doesn’t everything have gravity? Why would we be so special? Why would we be the only communicating beings?”
“By that same logic, everything — every force, every movement, and even existence — is some sort of discussion to you?”
They began spinning faster around one another.
John thought for a moment. “I guess so. If nothing interacted — if there was no communication of gravity or light– we wouldn’t experience anything. Gravity is the conversation between space, matter, and time. It is the conversation between particles that holds us together.” He was out of thoughts now, but he was happy to distract her in her final moments.
But Carla picked up the slack. “Gravity is what connects you and I … it’s what will kill us but it’s also what let us be together.”
As they approached each other, their forms began deteriorating.
She continued, “Is there any difference between our talks and the complicated banter of the particles that make us up? If their conversation creates our being, does our conversation create… some other being? And when we fuse, might we still talk — just in some other way?”
John was at a loss of words — maybe because his body was being flattened, or maybe because her theory felt too beautiful to be true. “I hope we can talk forever.”
John and Carla broke apart. Their bodies were mangled and crushed into blackness.
—
Back on Earth, I sit at my desk, stunned. Working with the other scientists in the lab, I analyze the sublime dance of the celestial destruction, translating their conversation into the language of math and hoping to uncover more about the language of the universe.
A language is a web of relationships — of interconnecting words and concepts dynamically changing in response to everything else. In short, language is the universe and everything in it, including myself. Math relates variables.
English relates subjects and verbs. I relate every piece of knowledge and every experience I have ever had, building my vocabulary with every discussion.
I am a conversation, and I cannot wait to speak with you.
