Quotes from Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life"

I collect some quotes from Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" below. Most are rather technical; that is because of the nature of the story; non-technical ones are prefixed with a "*".

1. "the human auditory system isn't an absolute acoustic instrument; it's optimized to recognize the sounds that a human larynx makes. With an alien vocal system, all bets are off."
2. * "You seem to be implying that no alien could have learned human languages by monitoring our broadcasts." "I doubt it. They'd need instructional material specifically designed to teach human languages to nonhumans. Either that, or interaction with a human. If they had either of those, they could learn a lot from TV, but otherwise, they wouldn't have a starting point."
3. * 'In 1770, Captain Cook's ship Endeavour ran aground on the coast of Queensland, Australia. While some of his men made repairs, Cook led an exploration party and met the aboriginal people. One of the sailors pointed to the animals that hopped around with their young riding in pouches, and asked an aborigine what they were called. The aborigine replied, "Kanguru." From then on Cook and his sailors referred to the animals by this word. It wasn't until later that they learned it meant "What did you say?" ... I tell that story in my introductory course every year. It's almost certainly untrue, and I explain that afterwards, but it's a classic anecdote.'
4. "this symbol ... is 'semasiographic' writing, because it conveys meaning without reference to speech. There's no correspondence between its components and any particular sounds... It's essentially a grammar in two dimensions."
5. Wikipedia article describes the Fermat's Principle of this quote in some detail - light travels to either minimize or maximize the time to reach destination; refraction properties of materials are a consequence of this: "You're used to thinking of refraction in terms of cause and effect: reaching the water's surface is the cause, and the change in direction is the effect. But Fermat's Principle sounds weird because it describes light's behavior in goal-oriented terms. It sounds like a commandment to a light beam: 'Thou shalt minimize or maximize the time taken to reach thy destination.' ... It's an old question in the philosophy of physics. People have been talking about it since Fermat first formulated it in the 1600's; Planck wrote volumes about it. The thing is, while the common formulation of physical laws is causal, a variational principle like Fermat's is purposive, almost teleological... let's say the goal of a ray of light is to take the fastest path. How does the light go about doing that? ... the light has to examine the possible paths and compute how long each one would take... And to do that, ... the ray of light has to know just where its destination is. If the destination were somewhere else, the fastest path would be different... And computing how long a given path takes also requires information about what lies along that path, like where the water's surface is... And the light ray has to know all that ahead of time, before it starts moving ... The light can't start traveling in any old direction and make course corrections later on, because the path resulting from such behavior wouldn't be the fastest possible one. The light has to do all its computations at the very beginning."
6. 'when humans thought about physical laws, they preferred to work with them in their causal formulation. I could understand that: the physical attributes that humans found intuitive, like kinetic energy or acceleration, were all properties of an object at a given moment in time. And these were conducive to a chronological, causal interpretation of events: one moment growing out of another, causes and effects created a chain reaction that grew from past to future.' 'In contrast, the physical attributes that the heptapods found intuitive, like "action" or those other things defined by integrals, were meaningful only over a period of time. And these were conducive to a teleological interpretation of events: by viewing events over a period of time, one recognized that there was a requirement that had to be satisfied, a goal of minimizing or maximizing. And one had to know the initial and final states to meet that goal; one needed knowledge of the effects before the causes could be initiated.'
7. "The physical universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one causal and the other teleological, both valid, neither one disqualifiable no matter how much context was available."
8. "Humans had developed a sequential mode of awareness, while heptapods had developed a simultaneous mode of awareness. We experienced events in an order, and perceived their relationship as cause and effect. They experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying them all."
9. * 'Everyone at a wedding anticipated the words "I now pronounce you husband and wife," but until the minister actually said them, the ceremony didn't count. With performative language, saying equaled doing.'

Related: All stories of Ted Chiang.