Science

Eddington’s experiment is an excellent example of what’s called a crucial test, which is sort of the pinnacle of what science is all about. If we do a test and it doesn’t agree with a particular theory that we have, that’s problematic. But that doesn’t mean that it refutes the theory. More

Brett, would you say that a scientific theory is a subset of a good explanation? Yes. They’re the testable kinds of good explanations. Falsifiable theories are actually a dime a dozen. This doesn’t tell you anything about the quality of the explanation you’re being given. The example that’s used in The Fabric of Reality is the grass cure for the common cold. More

There’s a phrase you’ll hear Brett and I use over and over again: “good explanations.” Good explanations are Deutsch’s improvement upon the scientific method. At the same time, it’s beyond science. It’s not just true in science but in all of life. We navigate our way through life, and we do it successfully by creating good explanations. More

The value is in the knowledge, and the knowledge is inside the observer and the creator, in other words, a human. It’s not inside the thing itself. For example, oil is useless unless you know how to refine it, burn it, and use it for combustion. Information is useless unless there’s a brain there to receive it.  There could be a signal broadcasting English into outer space, but if there isn’t a creature capable of understanding what that language is, how it works, and who’s conveying it, then it’s just modulated electromagnetic frequencies that don’t mean anything. More

Stephen Hawking famously said, “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can’t believe the whole universe exists for our benefit.” More

Knowledge is what transforms the world. We can take some raw material that has no particular use and within that raw material, we can find uranium nuclei, which then can be used to create bombs or energy in a nuclear reactor. We can find within something that for almost the entire geological existence of the earth sat there inert and would have done nothing, absent people. More

The difference with The Beginning of Infinity is you’re getting a worldview. You’re not getting the standard take from physicists about how to understand quantum theory. You’re not getting the standard take of how to understand knowledge from philosophers. And you’re certainly not getting the standard take of how to understand mathematics from mathematicians. More

The Beginning of Infinity reminds me the most of Gödel, Escher, Bach in that it is very wide-ranging and stitches together ideas from many different disciplines. It’s very difficult to understand and follow completely. Everyone claims to have read it, but, as far as I can tell, very few people understand it. More

At the beginning of The Fabric of Reality, David Deutsch presents this idea that you don’t need to know every single fact to fundamentally understand everything that can be understood. He presents this vision that there are four fundamental theories from science and outside science: quantum theory, the theory of computation, evolution by natural selection, and epistemology—which is the theory of knowledge. More

The Beginning of Infinity is not an easy book to read. Deutsch wrote it for other physicists and philosophers. He has a certain peer group that he respects, and that respects him, and he has to meet them at their level. I wanted to understand the principles in the book so I could confirm or refute them for myself. More