Quotes by David Deutsch

About David Deutsch:

David Elieser Deutsch is a British physicist at the University of Oxford. He is a non-stipendiary Visiting Professor in the Department of Atomic and Laser Physics at the Centre for Quantum Computation (CQC) in the Clarendon Laboratory of the University of Oxford. He pioneered the field of quantum computation by formulating a description for a quantum Turing machine, as well as specifying an algorithm designed to run on a quantum computer. He is a proponent of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
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The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche.

David Deutsch

Our best theories are not only truer than common sense, they make more sense than common sense.

David Deutsch

Time travel may be achieved one day, or it may not. But if it is, it should not require any fundamental change in world-view, at least for those who broadly share the world view I am presenting in this book.

David Deutsch

Science is objective. And in my view we cannot take any experimental results seriously except in the light of good explanations of them.

David Deutsch

I don't think it would be a good idea for scientists to have more political power. Scientists as a group are more inclined to try to derive an ought from an is, than the population at large.

David Deutsch

Where we have good, testable explanations, they then have to be tested, and we drop the ones that fail the tests.

David Deutsch

The most important application of quantum computing in the future is likely to be a computer simulation of quantum systems, because that's an application where we know for sure that quantum systems in general cannot be efficiently simulated on a clas...

David Deutsch

Humans may or may not have cosmic significance, and if they do, it will be by hitching a ride on the objective centrality of knowledge in the cosmic scheme of things.

David Deutsch

The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level of the predictive hierarchy, but the ones that contain the deepest explanations.

David Deutsch

The overwhelming majority of theories are rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests.

David Deutsch

It is possible to build a virtual-reality generator whose repertoire includes every possible environment.

David Deutsch

Every problem that is interesting is also soluble.

David Deutsch

Is the human race a universal constructor?

David Deutsch

To me quantum computation is a new and deeper and better way to understand the laws of physics, and hence understanding physical reality as a whole.

David Deutsch

The brain is the only kind of object capable of understanding that the cosmos is even there, or why there are infinitely many prime numbers, or that apples fall because of the curvature of space-time, or that obeying its own inborn instincts can be m...

David Deutsch

I myself believe that there will one day be time travel because when we find that something isn't forbidden by the over-arching laws of physics we usually eventually find a technological way of doing it.

David Deutsch

Quantum computation is... a distinctively new way of harnessing nature... It will be the first technology that allows useful tasks to be performed in collaboration between parallel universes.

David Deutsch

Author Bio

  • NameDavid Deutsch
  • DescriptionBritish physicist
  • Born1953
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionPhysicist; Computer Scientist; Author
  • AwardsFellow Of The Royal Society