It's important to be open minded when thinking about how alien life might perceive the universe. In that spirit, and being deliberately provoking, I previously wrote:
Was math so universal that any intelligent species discovered the same math as what humans had discovered? Could there be a universe where irrational numbers were the primitives upon which all mathematics was based, in the same way that humans based all of their mathematics on the prime numbers? Was there a “beautiful” universe in which irrational numbers did not exist, and all patterns were simple? Perhaps there was a universe which lacked electromagnetism, and, even as our universe had atoms whose changing bonds explained all physical phenomena, perhaps that other universe had manifields whose changing coordinate systems, mapping one dimension to another, explained all physical phenomena? Our own universe was composed of 3 solid dimensions and then a fractional 4th, but what would life be like in a universe that consisted only of fractional dimensions? How could aliens imagine something whole, if nothing in their universe was whole? How could such aliens imagine a “one”, an integer, something complete? Perhaps in such a universe the integers were the most difficult concept in math, only discovered after thousands of years of careful research. Perhaps there was an alien far smarter than any of his peers, admired even as we admire Einstein, whose greatest accomplishment was the discovery of the formula “1 + 1 = 2”, a formula which, in that universe, was so utterly counter-intuitive that most adults went through their life without ever understanding it.
Was math so universal that any intelligent species discovered the same math as what humans had discovered? Could there be a universe where irrational numbers were the primitives upon which all mathematics was based, in the same way that humans based all of their mathematics on the prime numbers? Was there a “beautiful” universe in which irrational numbers did not exist, and all patterns were simple? Perhaps there was a universe which lacked electromagnetism, and, even as our universe had atoms whose changing bonds explained all physical phenomena, perhaps that other universe had manifields whose changing coordinate systems, mapping one dimension to another, explained all physical phenomena? Our own universe was composed of 3 solid dimensions and then a fractional 4th, but what would life be like in a universe that consisted only of fractional dimensions? How could aliens imagine something whole, if nothing in their universe was whole? How could such aliens imagine a “one”, an integer, something complete? Perhaps in such a universe the integers were the most difficult concept in math, only discovered after thousands of years of careful research. Perhaps there was an alien far smarter than any of his peers, admired even as we admire Einstein, whose greatest accomplishment was the discovery of the formula “1 + 1 = 2”, a formula which, in that universe, was so utterly counter-intuitive that most adults went through their life without ever understanding it.