Quotes by David Deutsch

“Every problem that is interesting is also soluble.”

“I myself believe that there will one day be time travel because when we find that something isnt forbidden by the over-arching laws of physics we usually eventually find a technological way of doing it.”

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

“The quantum theory of parallel universes is not the problem, it is the solution. It is not some troublesome, optional interpretation emerging from arcane theoretical considerations. It is the explanation, the only one that is tenable, of a remarkable and counter-intuitive reality.”

“Surely it is more interesting to argue about what the truth is, than about what some particular thinker, however great, did or did not think.”

“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.”

“The theory of computation has traditionally been studied almost entirely in the abstract, as a topic in pure mathematics. This is to miss the point of it. Computers are physical objects, and computations are physical processes. What computers can or cannot compute is determined by the laws of physics alone, and not by pure mathematics.”

“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.”

“As I understand it, the claim is that the less you use Homeopathy, the better it works. Sounds plausible to me.”

“The next chapter is likely to provoke many mathematicians. This cant be helped. Mathematics is not what they think it is.”

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.

I myself believe that there will one day be time travel because when we find that something isnt forbidden by the over-arching laws of physics we usually eventually find a technological way of doing it.

“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.”

“The last room number is not infinity. First of all, there is no last room.”