Can You Explain Left And Right To An Alien? | QI

This clip is from QI Series H, Episode 8, 'Hypothetical' with Stephen Fry, Alan Davies, John Lloyd, Sandi Toksvig and Johnny Vegas.

[ortho_normal]

The elves missed something quite interesting! As Feynman noted in "Six Not-So-Easy Pieces", you can use magnetism to distinguish left from right (using the direction of magnetic force generated by a current).

However, there's a catch: the magnetism pattern is backwards if everything is made from antimatter.

So if you use this method to teach an alien left from right over the radio, and later you meet up in your spaceships, but the alien puts out the wrong hand, DO NOT SHAKE IT.

[GummyBearWA]

Used to teach teens how to sail. I told them Port has four letters and so does Left. Every class someone would ask, "How am I spelling Starboard with five letters."

[sarahjones]

Johnny Vegas is so funny in this clip: “I’m just a natural problem solver”! Or, “They might have 19 versions of left”! And then you have Sandi’s story about the ocean liner captain and his secretive silver box! Opposite ends of the comedy spectrum but both funny.

[oliverholmes-gunning]

1:40 If anyone's interested, the reason why aliens are usually depicted like that comes from a 1933 book by Gabriel Linde called The Unknown Danger, which featured a number of vivid illustrations that captured the popular imagination. Linde (real name Gustav Sandgren) may have based his creations off earlier descriptions of aliens by Aleister Crowley and HG Wells. The Roswell Incident and the alleged and much-publicised 1965 "abduction" of Barney and Betty Hill led to this type of alien, usually called the Grey Alien or Roswell Grey by ufologists, to become the de facto representation of aliens in popular culture. As a side note, the elongated head specifically may have been inspired by archaeological discoveries of Incan and Mayan elongated skulls due to the ancient practice of head binding.

[jonchambers]

When I was a student they showed Open University lectures on TV during the early hours - they were strangely mesmerising if you came back home at 3am drunk. I vaguely remember seeing one that covered exactly this; I was too addled to follow it but it was something to do with some quantum particle that would release different amounts of energy to the 'left' and 'right' when you did something clever to it. I know that's not very helpful but it was a long time ago and I was not at my sharpest.

[nex]

Here's the mnemonic I use: According to your typical dictionary (I'm using Wiktionary), starboard comes from “Proto-West Germanic *steurubord, equivalent to steer +‎ board”. I find this easy to remember because I've become quite good at German over the years (‘Steuerbord’ is also literally ‘steer[ing]’ + ‘board‘); there's probably more languages in which this works. The one additional thing you need to know is that the majority of people are right-handed, so on a simple boat that has just an oar tied to the boat for a rudder (no fancy mechanism with a steering wheel), they'll want it on the right-hand side. Now if you want to dock at some sort of pier or jetty, you'll want that on the opposite side, so you rudder won't collide with it. So the other side is port.

Btw., in German, the opposite of ‘Steuerbord’ is ‘Backbord’. Apparently there are several languages where it's similar, and the reason is that when you face the rudder, you turn your _back_ to the other (port) side.

[peskyfervid]

There is, in fact, a wonderful book by Martin Gardner called "The Ambidextrous Universe" which examines this specific question. It details many interesting phenomena, including why mirrors swap left and right, but not up and down, and a whole lot more. In the end, there is a way to determine left and right, but it requires a sophisticated experiment with cobalt, magnets, and a lot of electricity. Definitely worth a read for anyone interested in this subject.

[MountainHawkPYL]

My mom had a friend who always mixed up his left and right, and he referenced them as which hand do you hold your sandwich and which hand do you hold your milk.

[michaelshort]

If I remember correctly, the big-head, big-dark-eyes alien look stems from the Barney and Betty Hill UFO case and their description of the aliens. It later got cemented in The UFO Incident, a 1975 movie based off of their purported encounter. Before then, alien encounter witnesses described all sorts of fantastical beings; after that people almost exclusively met "alien Greys."

[casey]

The way I was taught as a kid to remember which one is left is that your finger and thumb make an L facing you while the right hand would make an L facing outwards

[ashleyzinyk]

Since you're talking to the aliens by radio, they can examine your radio signal, which you can polarize in a left-circular or right-circular way. We can tell them our name for that polarization, and then they'll know which side we've arbitrarily labelled "left".

Despite what Alan and Johnny say about aliens not having the concept of left and right, those concepts should be understandable to lots of aliens. Any animal-like creature that evolved on a flat surface, like the ground or an ocean floor, should have the concept of up & down (based on the direction of gravity) and forward and backward (the direction you're going, the direction you came from). The aliens should be able to understand that there's an axis that's perpendicular to both forward-backward and up-down; the only hard thing to communicate is the arbitrary labeling of one direction of that axis as "left".

[adashofbitter]

Alan absolutely nailed this one. If you can share co-ordinates you can work out right and left.

[NewMessage]

it doesn't matter anyway.... those ancient civilizations never turn their blinkers on to turn anyway.

[korbell]

Veterans don't have that problem because if it isn't left, "It's your other left!"😂😂

[avinotion]

I just love John Lloyd's voice.
Wish he'd do more podcasts like in NSTAAF... or audio books. I'll buy any book he's narrating.

[JakubS]

What about chirality? The weak force only acts on left-handed matter and right-handed antimatter. So unless sterile neutrinos exist, you could just say that left-handed is the direction clockwise of matter that interacts with neutrinos. Now you'd have to explain what clockwise rotation is, which is probably easier.

[littlesnowflakepunk]

"Assuming you have bilateral symmetry and at least two eyes facing in the same direction, in our language there are six cardinal directions. Forward is the direction that your eyes are pointing, backward is the opposite of that direction, up is the direction of the sky, and down is the direction of the ground. Left and right are consistent ways of referring to the directions perpendicular to forward, backward, up and down, and honestly it doesn't really matter which one's which as long as you're consistent."
That phrase has a 50/50 chance of communicating the concepts of left and right perfectly.

[xcoder]

Here's how you do it: They will have the same atoms and molecules as we have on earth, since the entire galaxy is made of the same kind of matter produced by super- and kilonovae. So we can explain to them what a sugar molecule look like or most likely they will already know sugar as it's hard to imagine a planet having life without that molecule. If you solute lots of sugar in water (water is also very common, asteroids often consist largely of ice) and shine light though it, the sugar will polarize the light clockwise, always! That way we can explain the terms clockwise and counterclockwise and if you have defined those, you can explain left and right easily.

[scooterdooter]

The question implies that you know their position in space, though. How else do you know where to aim your radio transmitter? From there, use a 3D map of the galaxy and rotate it until you see the stars from their point of view. Find 3 different stars that appear roughly level in their night sky, and say, "the red one is to the left of the white one, and the blue one is to the right of it."

[barneylaurance]

Could you send a circularly polarized radio signal and ask them to refer to that? Not much better than referencing distant stars though.