SPIEGEL: Herr Professor Deutsch, Sie glauben, dass der Mensch, nach Abermilliarden Jahren absoluter Ödnis im Universum, dieses nun nach seiner Fasson umgestalten wird, eine kosmische Zeitenwende stehe bevor. Ist das Ihr Ernst?
SPIEGEL: Herr Deutsch, Sie behaupten, unser Universum sei nur eines von vielen.
Deutsch: Von sehr, sehr vielen sogar. Alles, was physikalisch möglich ist, geschieht in mindestens einem dieser Universen...
Frage: Herr Deutsch, Sie sagen, dass es ein Universum gibt, in dem die Erde anders als in unserem Universum vor 60 Millionen Jahren nicht von einem Kometen getroffen wurde. Sind Sie sich sicher?
David Deutsch: Ja, ganz sicher...
“I OCCASIONALLY go down and look at the experiments being done in the basement of the Clarendon Lab, and it’s incredible.” David Deutsch, of the University of Oxford, is the sort of theoretical physicist who comes up with ideas that shock and confound his experimentalist colleagues—and then seems rather endearingly shocked and confounded by what they are doing...
Physicist David Deutsch is considered the founding father of quantum computing. In his 2011 book, The Beginning of Infinity, Deutsch argues that there is such a thing as objective beauty.
What is your argument for the existence of objective beauty?
The argument I like best...
...I think that there are indeed insights to be gained by applying quantum theory to the theory of constructors, and it’s one of the things I have been trying to do. However, there is no reason to believe that quantum physics makes universal constructors impossible. Quite the contrary...
...When I was a graduate student, for my thesis I studied quantum field theory in curved space-time – a topic that is on the boundary between quantum theory and the General Theory of Relativity. It was hoped – it still is hoped – that one day these two theories will be unified...
...What I am aiming for now is a new kindof theory, quantum constructor theory, which is the theory of what can be built, or more generally, the theory of what can be done, physically....
...OK, maybe some physicists still subscribe to an exception to that, namely the so-called "collapse of the wave function" when an object is observed by a conscious observer. But that nonsense is not the nonsense I am referring to here. I'm referring to misconceptions even about the sub-microscopic world—like: "when an electron in a higher-energy state undergoes a transition to a lower energy level, emitting a photon, it quantum-jumps from one discrete orbit to another without passing through intermediate states"...
A range of dark hilltops appears against a dawn sky. On a ridge in the far distance we can discern a human silhouette. It is some- one telling us about the uniqueness of Man. “Man ...” says the tiny figure in the landscape, “is not a figure in the landscape ...”
“He is the shaper of the landscape,” continues Jacob Bronowski, dwarfed by the looming hills that have not been reshaped since the last ice age...
[Ignorieren Sie den etwas irreführenden Titel.]
That human beings can be mistaken in anything they think or do is a proposition known as fallibilism. Stated abstractly like that, it is seldom contradicted. Yet few people have ever seriously believed it, either.
That our senses often fail us is a truism; and our self-critical culture has long ago made us familiar with the fact that we can make mistakes of reasoning too...
...The upshot is that, unlike any functionality that has ever been programmed to date, this one can be achieved neither by a specification nor a test of the outputs. What is needed is nothing less than a breakthrough in philosophy, a new epistemological theory that explains how brains create explanatory knowledge and hence defines, in principle, without ever running them as programs, which algorithms possess that functionality and which do not...
With the discovery that the universe’s expansion is accelerating, not slowing, as was previously thought, newspaper headlines are proclaiming that Albert Einstein was right, after all. But Einstein's most important legacy is his belief that a physical world, existing in reality, accounts for all of our experience....
Every problem that is interesting is also soluble.
Inherently insoluble problems are inherently boring.
In the long run, the distinction between what is interesting and what is boring is not a matter of subjective taste but an objective fact...
Unlike many ancient philosophical problems, this one has, paradoxically, been made both more urgent and less tractable by the gradual triumph of scientific rationality. Indeed, the prevailing modern attitude towards it is a sort of dogmatic despair: ‘you can‘t get an ought from an is, therefore morality must be outside the domain of reason‘...
A journey of a thousand miles begins, obviously, with a single step. But isn’t it equally obvious that a step of a single metre must begin with a single millimetre? And before you can begin the last micron of that millimetre, don’t you have to get through 999 other microns first? And so ad infinitum? That “ad infinitum” bit is what worried the philosopher Zeno of Elea...
"What Questions Have Disappeared...And Why?" Funny you should ask that. "And why? " could itself be the most important question that has disappeared from many fields.
"And why?": in other words, "what is the explanation for what we see happening?" ...
Claims that the standard methodology of scientific testing is inapplicable to Everettian quantum theory, and hence that the theory is untestable, are due to misconceptions about probability and about the logic of experimental testing...
Constructor theory seeks to express all fundamental scientific theories in terms of a dichotomy between possible and impossible physical transformations - those that can be caused to happen and those that cannot. This is a departure from the prevailing conception of fundamental physics which is to predict what will happen from initial conditions and laws of motion...
Quantum theory and the classical theory of computation were perfected in the 1930s, and fifty years later they were unified to form the quantum theory of computation. Here I want to tell you about a speculation — I can’t call it more than a “speculation” even though I know it’s true — about the kind of theory that might, in another fifty years’ time, supersede or transcend the quantum theory of computation...
The Primacy of Ideas, with David Deutsch (Do Explain with Christofer Lövgren, 2019)
The Beginning of Infinity, Explanations That Transform the World (The Innovation Show, 2019)
David Deutsch on the infinite reach of knowledge (Transkript) (The TED Interview, 2018)
Oxford physicist predicts AI will be human in all but name (CBC Radio: The Current, 2018)
Is there a limit to what we can know? (Transkript) (CBC Radio: The Current, 2018)
Humanity's Infinite Reach (mp3) (The Christian Transhumanist Podcast, 2017)
Finding Our Way In the Cosmos (mp3) (Making Sense with Sam Harris, 2016)
Surviving the Cosmos (mp3) (Transkript) (Making Sense with Sam Harris, 2015)
AI: think again (mp3) (ABC, 2013)
Constructor Theory (Transkript & Video) (Edge, 2012)
David Deutsch And The Beginning of Infinity (wbur On Point, 2011)
Explanations That Transform the World (mp3) (Kera Think Radio, 2011)
Infinite Beginnings (mp3) (Groks Science Radio Show and Podcast, 2011)
Fear not, problem-solving children of the Enlightenment, for we are the center of the universe (mp3) (KPCC Air Talk, 2011)