Today's post, That Alien Message was originally published on 22 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Einstein used evidence more efficiently than other physicists, but he was still extremely inefficient in an absolute sense. If a huge team of cryptographers and physicists were examining a interstellar transmission, going over it bit by bit, we could deduce principles on the order of Galilean gravity just from seeing one or two frames of a picture. As if the very first human to see an apple fall, had, on the instant, realized that its position went as the square of the time and that this implied constant acceleration.

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Einstein's Speed, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

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