The pictographic script of ancient Egypt can hold profound insights into present-day science if you know where to look; Luna Zagorac and Robert Spekkens are among the physicists pioneering novel ways to understand this ancient language, writes Colin Hunter.
When theoretical physicist Robert Spekkens looks at Egyptian hieroglyphics, he thinks of quantum theory and its disparate interpretations.
When particle cosmologist Luna Zagorac looks at hieroglyphics, she thinks of astronomical datasets and precision timekeeping.
For both Spekkens and Zagorac, there remains much new wisdom to be found in writings on ancient tombs and sarcophagi. Neither scientist, it bears noting, claims to have discovered quantum physics equations or astrophysical formulae hiding in hieroglyphics.
What they have discovered are new ways of looking at old problems – and old ways of looking at new problems.
The Riddle of the Sphinx
Spekkens, a faculty member at Perimeter Institute working in quantum foundations, sees the quest to decipher hieroglyphics – which vexed Egyptologists for decades – as a metaphor for the quest of physicists over the past century to devise a cohesive interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Both quests, Spekkens argues, have been impeded by a fallacy called a category error.
For centuries, Egyptologists struggled to decipher hieroglyphics because they were unwittingly making a category error – mistakenly believing hieroglyphics to belong to a category of symbolic writing called ideograms.
It was long believed that hieroglyphics were ideograms – that is, literal representations of ideas – but this belief placed hieroglyphics in the wrong category of languages.
“The category mistake that stymied so many scholars’ attempts to decipher hieroglyphics concerned the nature of the glyphs,” writes Spekkens. “They were assumed to be ideograms representing an idea directly and pictorially, independent of any spoken language, like the symbols on airport signs. In fact, they were phonograms, representing the sounds of a spoken language.”
When Jean-François Champollion finally deciphered the phonetic alphabet of hieroglyphics in the early 1880s, it caused a sensation and changed Egyptology almost overnight.
Quantum theory could be due for a similar revolution, Spekkens argues, if physicists can find the Rosetta Stone to its interpretation as Champollion did for hieroglyphics. "Just as the ideographic fallacy prevented the understanding of hieroglyphs, the assumption that quantum states describe reality has hindered our understanding of quantum theory," he writes.
Spekkens says the “staggering lack of consensus” about the interpretation of quantum theory comes down to a category error about the type of thing a quantum state really is – a depiction of reality, or some other category of thing?
The evidence against quantum states representing reality “bears a strong analogy,” Spekkens argues, “to the nature of evidence against the idiographic interpretation of hieroglyphics just prior to their decipherment.”
Ancient star clocks, new knowledge for astrophysics
When not hunting for dark matter as a postdoctoral researcher at Perimeter Institute, Luna Zagorac immerses herself in languages – ancient, modern and computer.
She is using two languages, Middle Egyptian and Python, to gain new insights into the evolution of human understanding and heritage of the night sky.
The hieroglyphs inscribed on the tombs of pharaohs turn out to be powerful tools in understanding the movements of the cosmos.
“There is a phenomenon known as precession of the equinoxes which describes the wobble of the Earth’s tilt in the solar system," says Zagorac. "Right now, the Earth’s north pole is pointing at a star called Polaris, the North Star. Back in the time when pharaohs called Rameses ruled over Egypt, it was pointing somewhere completely different.”
Working with Sarah Symons, a renowned researcher specializing in the history of science at McMaster University, Zagorac is examining some of the earliest astronomical records in existence: the 3,100-year-old Ramesside star clocks.
Each of these diagrams describes the positions of stars in relation to a body part of a human figure (which results in the peculiar quirk that all these images depict the stars from only one direction).
Zagorac and Symons see these star clocks as datasets that can be computer-modeled and compared to present-day astronomical knowledge. She is building a computer program called decanOpy to create star clocks that depict, as accurately as possible, the night sky as it appeared in the New Kingdom.
“Our goal is to simulate what the night sky looked like on any night through history, then use decanOpy to create synthetic star clocks.” They hope to model star clocks for any given night sky in the past, and also project their model data onto our night sky.
“Radical interdisciplinarity”
The intermingling of astrophysics and ancient languages is a practice Zagorac likes to call “radical interdisciplinarity,” which she believes is key to making progress on difficult challenges.
For Spekkens, hieroglyphics offer a kind of warning from the past about getting stuck in an errant way of categorizing problems.
Spekkens and Zagorac are not the only physicists embracing this radical interdisciplinarity to glean new insights from hieroglyphics. A team of scientists from the Italian National Research Council, for example, has developed a “convolutional neural networks” AI program called Glyphnet for efficient classification and translation of hieroglyphics.
“In facilitating exchange and cross-fertilization between different research fields, as was the case with this work, expertise from Egyptology, computer engineering and applied physics were combined,” said team member Costanza Cucci, an expert in data analysis in the field of cultural heritage.
“The hope is that this first study will pave the way toward a stable collaboration between the archaeology and artificial intelligence communities to create new tools to facilitate the work of scholars of the writings of ancient civilizations."
Spekkens encourages this interdisciplinarity approach for “many other problems in physics for which the proposed solutions are not yet compelling because they are not yet embedded in a web of mutually supporting relationships with the rest of physics. For these, the story of the decipherment of hieroglyphs should prompt us to reflect more deeply about our presuppositions.”
Colin Hunter is a science writer, filmmaker and contributor to FirstPrinciples. He previously led the communications teams at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Institute for Quantum Computing.
