David Deutsch
David Deutsch
David Elieser Deutsch, FRS, is an Israeli-born 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 Computationin 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...
David Deutsch quotes about
reality law understanding
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.
play interesting people
I chop and change between what is called 'work' and what is called 'recreation.' There are no discontinuities in my day. I only play tennis with people I find interesting.
fall apples numbers
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 morally wrong, or that it itself exists.
may suggestions cynicism
Despite the unrivaled empirical success of quantum theory, the very suggestion that it may be literally true as a description of nature is still greeted with cynicism, incomprehension, and even anger.
biblical years data
The theory that the biosphere was created without evolution, a few thousand years ago, is ruled out by overwhelming scientific evidence. To claim that there are 'alternative (always better) Biblical explanations of the same data', which make creationism a reasonable alternative to our best theories of biology and physics, is appalling intellectual dishonesty.
race humans human-race
Is the human race a universal constructor?
tests majority failing
The overwhelming majority of theories are rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests.
views light results
Science is objective. And in my view we cannot take any experimental results seriously except in the light of good explanations of them.
program understood ifs
If you can’t program it, you haven’t understood it.
creativity discovering explanation
Discovering a new explanation is inherently an act of creativity.
needs fixing principles
No precautions, and no precautionary principle, can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee. We need a stance of problem-fixing, not just problem-avoidance.
may schemes cosmic
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.
important computer simulation
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 classical computer.
interesting problem
Every problem that is interesting is also soluble.